WOODBURNERS
WE RECOMMEND - THUMBNAIL SKETCHES OF A FEW MORE BOOKS & RECORDINGS
FOR THE HOLIDAYS 2004

Forward,
into the Past!

- Firesign
Theater

HARDBOILED HOLLYWOOD, Max
Decharne (No Exit Press): with
colored illustrations showcasing many of the books where the
films were hatched and poster advertisements of the time. A behind
the scene of the crime scenes knowledge and flair by a writer
who draws from Little Caesar to LA Confidential and thankfully
not missing In A Lonely Place (one of the better essays)
and the cornball importance of Dillinger. A fine glossary
of books to be read despite the films filling your head.

ROCKY SCHENCK, PHOTOGRAPHS
(U of Texas Press) :
a photographer whose interior shots could as well be exterior
and vice versa, we never know quite where we are (except where
he has us) ala dreamscape David Lynch focus to Schenck's photographs
that just may send you. You could easily skip Lynch if you prefer
and land squarely into the film wonder of The Third Man
as well. With many of the full plate photographs laid out to
the right and white space to the left, no text, no title captions.
This photographer is as quietly confident as they come.

MERZ TO EMIGRE AND BEYOND,
Steven Heller (Phaidon): avant-garde
magazine design from the 20th century with the best of the cultural
instigators around - international scoped from 1920s Merz
through the Dadaists, Surrealists, View to The
Oracle, Paul Krassner's The Realist, stripped down
Punk, to Art Spiegelman's short-lived Raw and the
digitally enhanced Emigre. Smart as a whip historical
text and beautifully realized graphics make this a fine lap companion.

WATERFRONT, Phillip Lopate (Crown): this is Phillip Lopate's
finest hour and book - after decades of so-so poetry, novels,
ever bright enough collections of essays - in this gathering
of well wrought Manhattan steeped reflections, it may be placed
beside the bard Whitman, storyteller Joseph Mitchell and underground
Alexander Trocchi and just the book Alfred Kazin wanted to write
and never quite pulled it off. All of the writers mentioned make
pinpoint to luxurious passages through this indigenous goodness
of the city, it's bridges and life under bridges, Captain Kidd
to Con Edison. There's nothing like a native son who can finally
sing his song. Dedicated to New Yorkers everywhere.

MERCY, Lucille Clifton (BOA
Editions): hands down
Lucille Clifton is the finest poet I've heard read, and Ruth
Stone is a close second. Just chalk it up to my own personal
affection for poets that don't read per se, but speak,
talk and accompany the audience, so the performance disappears
to something, well, with us. Each of Clifton's books show
the same strengths, most often with an immediacy that disarms
the reader left with so little on the page while enchanting
one's insides or else a militant humanism that hasn't been seen
since dear Gwendolyn Brooks. Most white poets just don't seem
to get as down and gritty and sweet as all this whether in
spirit / or out of spirit / we don't know

Nor do most younger poets have
the shine and syntactical jest of a Lisa Jarnot, BLACK DOG
SONGS (Flood Editions): Flood continues to publish some of
the more interesting new books of poetry that at least catch
my eye long before I think,
"who published this?" Jarnot's picture perfect honed
gems are everything the doctor ordered, just what Gertrude Stein
had in mind about Language and just what many of the poets taking
up that mantle have train wrecked into a psycho's rubix cube
- run for the hills, where you will find Jarnot singing from
branch to branch, much like I remember her reading and her presence
once upon a time at a Milwaukee reading. The newest of the young
poets just don't get much better than this. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld
take heart, there are poems dedicated herein for you I'm going
to ask you to transition into a new theme

Ah, imagine something as miraculous
as this bubbling to the surface: A USEFUL ART, Louis Zukofsky
(Wesleyan) : the poet's essays and radio scripts on American
design. When hired by the Federal Arts Project (in the 1930s,
at the seedling of his powers when LZ was a student in Ezra Pound
"university") to map out a compendium of facts and
descriptions on traditional American crafts. The mathematician
mind was already playing haywire with the poetic idiom, now watch
him with colonial ironwork that only budges one way, through
kitchenware, tin smiths, quilters and carpenters of New Amsterdam.
The radio script Zukofsky is as fine as recalling John Fahey
once sharing the musical pleasures of Elizabeth Cotton or Bukka
White. Tradition is essential all experimenters! and visa-versa.
A foreword by John Taggart adds a bonus Two hand wrought iron
nails from roofing boards of the old Derby Academy, Hingham,
Massachusetts, built in 1784, were still good in 1930 after 145
years of use, and attest to the care spent by the early Americans
in their houses.

WHITE PINE PRESS - Companions
For the Journey Series - the
first sixvolumesof the series and a very handsome
handful they are:Wild Ways: zen poems of Ikkyu, There Is No
Road/Antonio Machado, 10,000 Dawns: love poems of Yvan &
Claire Goll, Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow/ Yang Wan-li,
Back Roads to Far Towns/Basho (Corman), A Zen Forest: Zen Sayings
(w/ a foreword by Gary Snyder): they're all excellent, some
reprints from earlier editions we all own (Basho mostso): the
Goll translated by Thomas Rain Crowe and companion Nan Watkins,
with Chagall drawings, certainly rivals the Corman with Basho
for the heart's synchronicity - teaming the two intimate translators
off lovers Yvan and Claire Goll. The Machado has some of his
zenith short poems wonders written after the death of his wife,
and who better than Ikkyu to set the stage of how not to contemplate
- some 500 years before Richard Farina sang to us that his rebel
artist did everything right except he couldn't grow a beard!
- Ikkyu sayeth: After I'm gone, some of you will seclude yourselves
in the forests and mountains to meditate, while others may drink
rice wine and enjoy the company of women. Both kinds of Zen are
fine, but if some become professional clerics, babbling about
"Zen as the Way" they are my enemies. Could it
be said any plainer? Ideal to read one book a day in the series,
week after week after week.

-----------

When I'm alone
my friends are with me;
when I'm with them,
they seem so distant!

- Antonio Machado (trans.
Dennis Maloney/Mary G. Berg )

------------

MERRILL GILFILLAN is a writer I have been reading longer
than I realize. Suddenly three or four books are separated in
different rooms and in different parts of my library written
by the same hombre and in poetry & prose. But with Gilfillan
both thread together as the same; yes, he is that good. Natural.
Very quietly coming into focus. One day, who knows when, I bought
from the Collected Works Bookshop in Santa Fe his Magpie Rising.
I'm sure I was later on a train with the book and windows
of the train were the windows of each page - Gilfillan has an
outdoor mind, as if each essay and poem were sketched out on
note pad in the field and later torqued technically efficient
but losing none of the weather off the page. Some years later
I found, happenstance, Burnt House To Paw Paw (say what?!):
Appalachian Notes which further thrilled me. Now arriving
in the mail a gift of Gilfillan's most recent book of poems Small
Weathers (Qua Books) which, if Zukofsky's child with Lorine
Niedecker had become, it may have been this poet.Poems / like irises / rise / to perpetuate their kind.
I've a sneaky feeling Michael Gizzi may be the brains behind
Pa bringing us more and more Gilfillan from two separate presses,
and from Qua Books I've yet to read a boner. All champs - Ashbery,
Berkson, Stanley, Gilfillan. I requested a review copy of the
Bill Berkson and received the Gilfillan instead. Quite. All.
Right.

A PASSION FOR TRAINS, the
railroad photography of Richard Steinheimer, text Jeff Brouws
(Norton): what I have
always loved about Richard Steinheimer's photographs of trains
and train life is that it is the same love I have for trains.
For Steinheimer, it may have been a substitute for a lost father.
One look and he has you, and you can think of hundreds of similar
instances - workers in jeans with cuffs, night stillness cut
in two by a phantom train, that billowing coal drag. His models
are a combination of W. Eugene Smith for the bold drama and unique
corner of the eye, mixed with an Anselm Adams concurrency of
the western landscape, often exquisitely shaped with a human
touch and not just the muscular iron - though that is there through
deep snow country, the plains, piled trestle and snowsheds, and
the cross rails of a storming steam age to a cleaner diesel.
The era covered here is exactly Kerouac's time and the text by
Brouws has a patience and reward to match the amount of freight
passing through. Plate 1 & 2 alone could hold you for hours.

New & some older recordings:
the same moment I was
coming in to see my contact and to pickup the new Albert Ayler
boxset of destiny, a fellow about my son's age was excitedly
tearing off the wrapper and sharing for all to see the new Nirvana
boxset with CDs and DVD. No one but my electrically eclectic
son was able to look at the Nirvana and Ayler passing over the
table at the same time - like ships passing through the night
if there ever was a moment - but I did hear the young manager
of the store quip: "A box of Excedrin to go with that Ayler?"
Poor Albert, the noise-maker. The Holy Ghost, indeed.
One of the many tormented or scorned or burning brights that
leapt to their deaths into New York City waters - whether Spaulding
Gray or Ray Johnson. Lew Welch hiked away with his rifle into
the California Sierra, never to be found. Someone else jumped
from the Golden Gate Bridge instead of Weldon Kees, one rumor
goes. Kees later 'found' down in Mexico, of course! with B. Traven
or Ambrose Bierce. The 20th century alone is made up of a whole
disappearing act of literature & music. You could spend a
lifetime chronicling a syllabus. The dynamos at Revenantbelieve in theafterlife and have now released
a metal box library of Albert Ayler titled The Holy Ghost,
complete with 9 CDs, cloth bound book and about anything you
might need for that desert island which includes photographs,
audio interviews and mucho playing of the tenor/alto/soprano
sax maestro of rare and unissued recordings bleaching hot the
years 1962-70. Remember, the sound is colors. For that
jazz aficionado who snorts, "I've heard and own everything".

Other recordings on CD. plus
one website: let's start
with the website: aquariusrecords.org, a good'un, in San Francisco,
and packed with logic by many music geniuses on vital-to-so-so
recordings of modern rock, new folk & such. I like the Aquarius
review of the new Nirvana boxset, since the reviewer grew up
with the group. Even though I turned my son onto their first
record when he was all of eight years old, he can sum-up today
with a wink or a grin just what their music does for him, when
I might take a rambling paragraph to do so. Like always, listen
to the young. I played for my father John Wesley Harding
in my time, now let some youngster turn your head to something
different. I also liked the fact the Aquarius reviewer dumped
boldly on those bedeviled groaners who snarl, "The Beatles
Suck!" Please, put a cork in it. Long ago Emitt Rhodes to
now Elliott Smith shows just what a Beatle influence can make,
and besides, in these shoddy times, we need much less menstrual
male bad moods administered from the likes of a Rumsfeld or some
Superstar, and more of a Mississippi John Hurt heaven or Jimmy
Scott sweetness. And enough of Tom Carson in the New York Times
on Bob Dylan's book Chronicles. It's an upbeat
and promising book, so get over it. Not everything hip has to
read like it plowed through the coals of hell before it reached
our pathetic shores. Besides, why can't we get used to the fact
Bob Dylan might just want to set the record straight after 40
years playing mind games with the media and press and here's
his chance to tell it like it is. For himself. The recent 60
Minutes interview with Dylan revealed he was about as ready to
talk to the press as my dog is willing to take a bath. He admires
Sinatra, John Wayne, wanted to attend West Point, and thinks
Johnny Rivers did a crack-up great job on his song Positively
4th Street , and the hipsters just don't want to buy it.
Their Idol has let them down. Gone Americana. So here's to
Woody, Cisco & Leadbelly, too.CDs: First note out of the chute, it's been well worth
the eight years wait for: Iris DeMent's, Lifeline gorgeous
through thirteen songs. Her best recording to date and she could
have sung with The Carter Family. Another long wait - only 25
years - and only his second solo album in a long life: Cowboy
Jack Clement, Guess Things Happen That Way: once a right
hand man at Sun Records, he went on to produce landmark albums
by Johnny Cash to Townes Van Zandt and now makes a killer all
his own, bridging royal country tradition with a Fellini aura
in cowboy hat. It's a miracle or a profound mistake to make something
this relishing and still I find the CD in many used bins waiting
weeks to be bought. Go find it. Hands down he does the truest
version of "Dreaming My Dreams With You"- take it personally
- it's as fine as the sparkling ukulele sounding "I'll See
You In My Dreams" of Joe Brown. The Great Santa Barbara
Oil Slick, John Fahey: great to see this turn up, packaged
in soft cardboard as if miniature LP, and no doubt many good
hands are keeping the dead troubadour's recordings coming, this
one from two live shows at The Matrix in San Francisco late 60s
of more trail busting finger picking, with occasional Fahey commentary
and even nose blowing...some inspired soul had the all important
tape rolling. Not new but new to me sent as gift and your answer
to: "what is a poet performing?" Mikhail Horowitz,
The Blues of the Birth with bits of music backup as hair-triggered
as the poetry and a confirmation that flowing poesy rap and jazz
may just have a bastard son. There is no way not to love the
opening tune "Swingin' Cicadas", take it from there!
I've also been listening to lots of early UK pop/rock & roll
like Sandie Shaw (gutsy, soaring and years ahead of her time),
Georgie Fame, moving it up to Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros
(Global a Go-Go) - a whole day can be lost there. Much like seeing
the return of Alice Coltrane, Translinear Light with son
Ravi. So, it's over long - they're both worth it. Elliott
Smith: From A Basement on the Hill only verifies our loss
to his untimely death, so buy the hype. Yes, Yes, Yes: new LeonardCohen, Dear Heather (LC speaketh & he hasn't lost
his jaw harp), JSP boxsets (4 CDs for about the price
ofone) of: Blind Boy Fuller (a voice like
tomorrow) and Masters of Memphis Blues: with full recordings
by Furry Lewis, Robert Wilkins, Frank Stokes from a Memphis blues
no longer there...literally torn to the ground for "progress":
meaning, more cash in the pockets of fewer.

Back to books: go and find, and you'll know when you
have it - it's a gilded two foot tall of a near Blakean Tintin
- Gary Panter's, Jimbo in Purgatory (Fantagraphics): being
a mis-recounting of Dante's Divine Comedy (all true) in
black and white pictures with piled up footnotes showing the
way through innumerable asides ranging from Ben Jonson, Milton,
Spenser, Kesey, Yul Brynner's West World; not to mention
"Thirty-three more best loved vinyl LP recordings"
all drawn and annotated. Jimbo thrives amidst outlandish proverbs.
And with this one, I definitely judge a book by its cover.

Jean Valentine can't even look up in her author's photograph
for her new and collected poems (1965-2003) DOOR IN THE MOUNTAIN
(Wesleyan), much like her poetry she would rather the poems
taking care of themselves. Less is definitely more, and her work
has only become further spare, intensified and attractively suspended
on the page...somehow making the earlier poems, which I always
was drawn hard to - book after slender book - now almost padded.
The development has been a success and this is a life's worth
you hold to. you / a breath on a coal

GOEST (Alice James) : a beautiful sound/title from Cole
Swensen and the poems edge in sharp, tonal and such a sureness
of movement line to line or page to page you become wrapped up
and still free Green moves through the tops of trees and grows
This is a poet who knows how to start and stop and leave a wake
- and while so many poets try this and pound us with their theory
- their Language, Swensen is reserved but allows us to walk through
her rooms while she is away.
-------------The First Lightbulb

precise erase

a gate again
where the sky died
in a coin

- Cole Swensen
--------------

This is an excellent collection
of less than 25 pages, doubled-up to 50 pages since it is a bilingual
edition of American/Italian of the poet Duncan McNaughton
who should be much better known outside poets' circles. His range
can storm to cantos length, couplet masterpieces, the narrative,
and a short poem dead ringer laced with a wicked deadpan humor.
His long poems you get lost in like you get lost in the weather:
it's part of you, meant for you, don't fight it. This is one
master language maestro mother. The book is Clandestines (Josef
Weiss Edizioni) translated in Italian by Cecilia Galiena
& Anna Ruchat and may be purchased through Longhouse. Enough
to know I'm cared for

Construction of the ideal domestic
universe, anyone? See MY HOUSE, MY PARADISE, Gustau Gili Galfetti
(Gingko) for the best results. Pages 154-159 are all devoted
to Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta - all rock, boat,
water, pathway, classicism surrounding culture and nature; preceded
by Howard Finster's Paradise Garden out of Georgia where
the artist bought a plot of land in 1961 for $1000 and proceeded
to make it glow; Raymond Isidore's La Maison de Picassiette:
a mosaic wonder, built out of the head with no architect's
plans (many of these artists adore this lifestyle) blended with
Italian villas, modern castles, a bottle built village and concluding
with a bang at Das Paradise of Cornelius King in Austria:
a compound of a sort that may be entered only after a required
purification act. The sense of spatial isolation, that illusory
characteristic of paradise, is only mediated by the views of
the stables nearby, shown on video screens. High walls abound
towards a natural environment of looking up at nearby mountains
and sky. I think I'll stay home in this valley.

Once upon a time Dana Gioia
was a student of Elizabeth Bishop's at Harvard. He was drawn
to the poetry of Robert Lowell (and it's important to keep in
mind he was not drawn to the poetry of John Wieners or Cid Corman,
long Boston boys) and Bishop wisely recommended that Gioia get
out from behind a book and go visit the monuments and buildings
of the city mentioned in Lowell's poetry. Gioia found the idea
"quaint" - until he followed Bishop's advice and saw
that she was quite right. The world has much to teach us about
poetry just as poetry can tell us much about the world. A
hideously naive statement that can only arrive from someone stuck
in the business world or upon an academic pedestal, and that's
still no excuse. Plenty have worked in both and have a vigorous
appetite for wonder and poetries. For the first time in his career,
Gioia is actually stretching his wings. A native of California
(Hawthorne), he seems to have had an inkling of a rebirth about
poetry after two decades lodged on the east coast and returning
to live on the west coast only to discover poets who had been
working out there for decades: William Everson, Kenneth
Rexroth and even little old Jack Spicer (there's the leap) are
pretty darn good poets, in need of "rediscovery" (where'd
they go?). And then comes the rub: not to misunderstand Dana
Gioia - they're good but not that good! - and in fact,
keep in mind, nearly all these poets are labeled by Gioia as
"minor poets"; whatever the hell that is? Gioia feels
comfortable amongst his kind and doesn't at all mind going to
a party with wilderness John Haines, New Yorker chic Kay Ryan,
"enfant terrible" James Tate (how terrible can
he beafter repeated prestigious awards?) his ladies:
Elizabeth Bishop, Janet Lewis, Barbara Howes (not a Lorine Niedecker,
Barbara Guest, Joanne Kyger within miles) and as a literary critic
I'm supposed to think this guy is working? His most valuable
piece in the book is from ground he knows the best - a soggy
hay bale essay on Longfellow, who by the way was Ezra Pound's
great uncle. Ever alert, Gioia is also narrow, partisan and not
leaving us much. Like a good woman, which I'm not but have learned
from, I wish to feel the earth shake. The book is called, appropriately,
DISAPPEARING INK (Graywolf).

On the other hand - Benjamin
Friedlander is a brat, he even admits he was as a youngster
when hounding poets Pound, Zukofsky, Duncan - "I only picked
on poets who meant a lot to me." - Oh, thanks a bunch! But
I believe the brat in the adult is what made the mischief in
this book and what a wunderkind it is bursting jelly donut style
with all sorts of inventions: names made up ala literary personalities
you may guess at-will riffed off in hyper satire style ala email
correspondence, to grounded biographies of poets of this moment
that he describes and explains as if anyone, except the 500 readers
out there, could care less about. And that's just the nerve I
like about all the book. It's gaseous, playful, blindly self-promotional,
exploratory, nasty and sincere with left & right hands pounding
the bongos and not at all a chump one-man-band. Friedlander is
threatening because he has a passion for the goods and his chapter
alone on "Literati of San Francisco" knocks the ball
in the shape of Dana Gioia's head, right out of the park...remembering
Gioia's one chapter from his book (above) "Fallen Western
Star: the decline of San Francisco as a literary region."
These Language Poets, and varied associates, plan to take over
the world (they can have it) and rid us of the father figures
(about time) with, naturally, new father figures (it's genetic)
but I am hoping the women win out over the boys - since by my
last count, on both hands, I came up with by far more poets with
womens names that hit the target of poetry - soul, line theory
and all that webbing, and what it means to be someone on earth.
For well over 300 pages of SIMULCAST (U/Alabama), Friedlander
will take you off the planet, into the bowels of poetry as the
new machine, and I recommend the ride. Just get a ticket back
into someone's arms.

Now to the poetry into someone's
arms: death, love and liberty in the American ballad THE ROSE
& THE BRIAR, ed. Sean Wilentz & Greil Marcus (Norton):
edited by two Dylan freaks who must have loved receiving
a solicited submission from R. Crumb (handwritten) where he stomps
down with one of those big sole shoes he draws on his cartoon
characters onto the editors heads and their proposal of ballads
to use in this book (there is a companion CD but it doesn't come
along with the book) - Crumb is beside himself at his hate for
the group The Band and their most famous song, "The Night
They Drove Old Dixie Down". Never mind loathing other choices
on the ballad-list, like Springsteen, Randy Newman, and to clinch
it off, "I don't even like Bob Dylan!" Crumb wails.
This letter from Crumb comes a third of the way into a book of
pretty good stuff but one then backtracks to the list of ballads
on the CD list and sure enough the old cartoonist - who correctly
describes himself as a "moloy fig", while still being
a signature artist for everything whacky about the 60s - seems
to have kept The Band off the play list. That's power, or coincidence.
It also reveals the mesmerizing labor of love that went into
this collection. The contributors are ballad players themselves
(Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family), novelists (Joyce Carol
Oates: from boxing to ballads), critics abound, poets, cultural
mavericks (Steve Erickson, Luc Sante), illustrations, a gooey
good glossary of books and songs, and then a dead giveaway of
just how wholesome these editors are: they dedicate the whole
ball of wax to Dave "Snaker" Ray, a mostly unknown
white blues boy from the midwest north country who just wanted
to sing and play guitar (well), whether with Koerner, Ray &
Glover, or by himself, come what may. Despite an early death
- he, and that dedication - shines on nearly every page.

- Bob Arnold

HAPPY HOLIDAYS
TO ALL - STAY FESTIVE, MAKE SOMETHING &

BUY USED!

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND
& THE WORLD SERIES & CORRUPT ELECTIONS 2004

Memorize your lines and don't bump
into the furniture -Spencer Tracy

Who is out there? I can only imagine.

So let me make a list of many books read over the past many
weeks. A little cold out here in Susan's studio where I work,
kerosene heater on, the door was open awhile to bring along still
a warmish October. A marvelous two months of foliage that only
began to fall after a killer frost two days ago, otherwise we
have been cutting firewood daily in the woodlot. The younger
beech trees - our size - hold onto their lemony leaves, oaks
all leathery; maples, cherry, ash, hickory and birch mostly all
leaf shed. We've been tramping in them down the trail packing
back firewood in canvas packs and satchels for the kitchen cookstove.
Don't ask. It's an old way.

Let's look at books. I'm playing an old LP of Caetano Veloso
over & over again. The 4th game of the World Series is tonight
and the Red Sox have won seven games in a row through the Yankees
and now the Cardinals. My Red Sox friends show absolutely no
sign of relief - pestered buggers - after years of losses. On
the back road drive to town I can find giant size "B"
or "Go Sox" displays on garages, barn sides, and up
in trees made from Christmas lights. Fanatical. Fans tell me,
bar none, that every one wants this thing over in four games.
Whereas I would revel in seven games, 12th inning on the final
game and right up to a full-count and pitch,

just as long as Boston doesn't lose again with a trickle hit
up the first baseline that goes through a poor guy's legs. Baseball
would be wonderful right up to near election day and then allow
Boston to win, and likewise let a Boston guy win, so we

can maybe get rid of a few nightmares. Get a few monkeys off
our backs.

Here is something written in the 1950s that could just as
well be scripted for today re Bush:

Buttressed by their belief that their God had entrusted
the earth into their keeping, drunk with power and possibility,
waxing rich through trade in commodities, human and nonhuman,
with awesome naval and merchant marines at their disposal, their
countries filled with human debris anxious for any adventures,
psychologically armed with new facts, white Western Christian
civilization during the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries, hurled itself upon the sprawling masses
of colored humanity in Asia and Africa." This isRichard WrightfromWhite Man, Listen!(1957)
He concludes this essay with: It can be said that
the white man is at bay. Never have so few hated and feared so
many. What I dread is that the Western white man, confronted
with an implacably militant Communism on the one hand, and with
a billion and a half colored people gripped by surging tides
of nationalist fanaticism on the other,will feel that only a
vengeful unleashing of atom and hydrogen bombs can make him feel
secure. I dread that there will be an attempt at burning up millions
of people to make the world safe for the "white man's"
conception of existence, to make the ideas of Mill and Hume and
Locke good for all people, at all times, everywhere...If the
white West should attack the body of mankind in this fashion,
it will not only sacrifice its own civilization, but will set
off reactions of racial and religious hatreds that will last
for generations. In trying in this manner to make the world safe
for their own kind only, the white West will wipe out of men's
minds the undoubtedly glorious contributions that it has made
to human life on this earth." Paperback of high wisdom
bought for a dime at the local Goodwill. Take it to the voting
booth on Tuesday.

Followed up byChain of Command by Seymour Hersh.
Since his My Lai book, few in the mainstream press have held
together such a tough and steady eye on the powers that be in
Washington DC. Compliments should go to The New Yorker for publishing
sections of this book and for Hersh himself who has appeared
on television speaking of the coup this country has gone through
since the bogus 2000 election and boosted valiantly by 911. Lie
to yourself but this book doesn't lie. There is so much about
this presidency that we don't know, and may never learn. Some
of the most important questions are not even being asked. How
did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed
that a war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism
get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange
long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease?
How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press,
mislead Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy
fragile? I have tried in this book, to describe some of the mechanisms
used by the White House-the stovepiping of intelligence, the
reliance on Ahmad Chalabi, the refusal to hear dissenting opinions,
the difficulty of getting straight talk about military operations
gone bad, and the inability-or unwillingness-of the President
and his senior aides to distinguish between Muslims who supported
terrorism and those who abhorred it. A complete understanding
of these last few years will be a challenge for journalists,
political scientists, and historians.And out of all
due respect, screw the professionals right now, it's living hell
for most citizens to understand.

After Wright, then Hersh, I would recommend readingEliot
Weinberger's: Freedom is on the March. I had mine sent by
email and it is making the rounds.

NOTHING LIKE THE HOMEMADE:out of the blue come these
books, made by hand, whole cloth, stapled or sewn or folded expertly
and glued: 5 Poems by Cid Corman (Hull Press, 301 N.
Daniel, Springfield, IL 62702): someone took an awful lot
of care & patience to make a text of simple pages and wrought
iron poems under handmade cloth covers and design. I knew it
was right as soon as I put my hand on it.Prose Poems
by Kirpal Gordon (www.leapingdogpress.com). I know it sounds
hip & cool but Gordon is the real deal: a jazz singer deep
down drift prose writer with the cadence of Mose Allison or Georgie
Fame. You will snap and crackle coming at these pages read aloud.
The book is in printed form, I simply provide the web address
for more, and there is much more, from Leaping Dog Press A
Life To Live: Santoka by Scott Watson (swbotl@ma.mni.ne.jp):
Watson is a poet, American, teacher in Japan, generally fine
rabble rouser on all things academic - which he also is, of a
sort - but how deliciously he likes to slam & bang around
the academics in this collection with his versions of Santoka's
poetry, complete with strident essay, many loosey-goose poems
and a mysterious photograph of an enlightened one with back to
camera, walking stick, treasured bonnet and a pause on the well
worn path peckers/and/pussies/a hot/bath/over-/flowing

Santoka toRobert Sundis a dovetail.Poems From Ish River Country (Shoemaker &Hoard)will finally be out in December of this
year. This volume will gather up all the poems by long time resident
and rower of its waters in the Pacific Northwest. His earlier
books of poems Bunch Grass andIsh River
have long been heralded by poets, and those that searched out
the poet's paintings and calligraphy (often accompanying his
scarce chapbooks) have a little secret that comes along with
a poet too long out of print. Hats off to Jack Shoemaker and
his associates long in the tooth publishing and persisting all
these decades to nail out one little masterpiece after another
despite the odds, the monstrous junk of the marketplace, and
to listen to some good folks in the field, barely known, who
are the heirs & poets of such like Sund. He learned from
Roethke, who we all know. Many of those that read their Roethke
though, missed Sund, who died in 2001. Now don't make the mistake
to miss those poets who have been living in and out of Sund's
rainshadow: Tim McNulty (who offers a companionable afterword
for this book), Mike O'Conner, Finn Wilcox, BillYake and many
more. This collection is 250 pages of take-me-to-a-desert-island
quality. In one book. One man.Somewhere in this ink bottle
/ there is a starry sky.

CORRECTION:the publication Poets & Writers
has done yeoman work over many years now and deserve our helping
hand, anyway we can, but should be corrected in one of their
recent issues about the The Top Ten Independent Presses currently
working in this country. I fall right into line like a kitty
cat and purr at the mere mention of these presses and read their
books and even write many reviews and moreso launch the books
before others when they visit our home as to a "great read,
don't forget". Priceless stuff. But most of the presses
mentioned are not independent. As young editors and presses they
may have been -in the wilds of the late 60s and fertile 70s-but
since then they have become grant junkies and foundation muckers
and very skilled bureaucrats in the system. I marvel at their
vision with design, scope of authors and chain of commitment
but it is a far cry from the many presses still in this country
that are truly independent, rough shod ground breakers with writers
found, and might first cut off something before admitting to
the sleaze-tease that follows these fellowships, foundations
and scurrilous grants. It better be said and awarded that the
likes of Copper Canyon Press et al., are not at all independent
but in fact prime movers & shakers of what mainstream publishing
should be. They are now up with the big boys and have earned
their way magnificently. But independentis still:
two mules and a plow.

I'm just finishing up Windblown World by Jack Kerouac
(Viking)one more of the many issued post death
Kerouac volumes finding the light of day through the sometime
auspices of good minds like Douglas Brinkley who has edited this
book from Kerouac's journals kept between the years 1947-54.
In it comes the backwaters to Kerouac's first book The Town
and the City - the true life characters like Huncke, Ginsberg,
Holmes, Carr, Cassady etc., coming to us from ground level as
pals . The struggle with the first book requirements, and, glowingly,
even in these doctored pages, the genesis for On the Road.
If you love your Kerouac - the at home with Ma brooding alone
at the kitchen table slugging out 1500 words through the wee
hours of the night trance - then this is your book I really
travel because I'm loveless

markets in the transformation of U.S. Culture. First off,
and I loved seeing them gleaned up for study, but I didn't buy
anything this writer had on ruth weiss and Bob Kaufman. It reads
manipulative, and as if one has gone to the ends of the earth
to find two beat writers no one else has done much on but coming
up with none of the goods. The whole book should have been a
biography of these two poets and what world of beatnik, underworld
and tribal context that could be expansively described. The finest
chapters in the book are on poets and jazz (Ready for Breakfast/Howl
of Love) where Whaley really gets whipped up, finally, on
the flow of composition..which also assists his own. What
improvisation retains by way of form, by way of control, and
by way of medium proscribes its freedom.

It's been a few weeks since I read Bob Dylan's Chronicles,
volume one (Simon &Schuster) a lousy titled
and equally lousy designed book but what a gorgeous

yarn. A knock your socks off quality from start to finish.
I have a friend in UK who mentioned he couldn't put the book
down and gulped it up in one-sitting. How in the world? I thought,
after my 40 years following the likes of Tarantula, mysterious
jekyll & hyde interviews, elusive appearances on television
and screen; but then don't forget the down & dirty sermons
from the stage, the out of nowhere spun magical cloth of folk
songs repartee, the present look part Edgar Allen Poe /part Hank
Williams, string-tie grin. This is an American boy like few have
been able to retain, and for once in his life, in print, he sets
his story down. For those that lived through the early 60s folk
years and all of a sudden it was: All Bob Dylan: will now have
you shaken to read how graciously and devotedly this master of
song remembers who came before him, helped him, and page after
page he sets their names in stone. That's a big deal when you're
folk. The hike out to Woody Guthrie's house was a wrong-turn
route in swamp up to his knees and the Oklahoman wasn't there
(in the hospital) and the drover left back through the swamp.
The aura and tone of youthfulness is invigorating from start
to finish, and the pure decency of an all American boy comes
through in Dylan's sketches ala homage to the likes of Archibald
MacLeish, Pete Maravich and Roger Maris, a fellow Minnesotan.
Some have been waiting for Dylan's best album since Blood
on the Tracks - this book is some of the best writing Dylan
has ever made, period, pen to paper. Song or text. And for all
those radicals made from Masters of War on the one hand, and
Highway 61 on the other, the author at one time wanted to enroll
at West Point, studies Clausewitz and without a doubt has got
your number on how to maneuver and still stay real. Not quite
an autobiography but a storyteller's fest. And I didn't even
go into the chapter on recording Oh Mercy and the side
bar tramps around the New Orleans countryside.

Chris Drurybuilds cairns and so do I so I sure
wanted his book on Found Moments In Time And Space (Abrams)
one of the finest books I own on the pickup-off-the- trail-and-build-as-you-go-along
method. Cairn maker, stone and wood hut structures in the wilds,
delicate found each day off the trail pieces for a weaving, woven
baskets or towers from sticks and seeds. I immediately trusted

this builder, loved the layout and photographs of the whole
book. Earthier than Goldsworthy and much less pronounced. The
true touch of stone and wood is here.I like the way that
a shelter has an interior as well as an exterior. They feel different
but are connected. I like the way this interior space draws you
inside yourself, enclosing, protecting, just as mountains pull
you outside yourself, pushing mind and body beyond their usual
confines

Montaigne who once wrote that our peculiar condition is
that we are made as much to be laughed at as to laugh - one
of the many engaging passages from the book Bartleby &
Co by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions) which has been
labeled a novel, and if it is (not) I would push aside every
novel I was told to read and indeed read all this year for more
of this delicious and steeped literary gruel. Taken from Melville's
Bartleby, the scrivener who "would prefer not to" Vila-Matas
takes us on a tour of "artists of refusal" like Oscar
Wilde who stopped writing the last two years of his life to discover
other pleasures (imagine!). That wise delight of doing 'nothing',
devoting himself to sheer laziness and absinthe. Or like Kafka,
he produced a compendium of unfinished texts, sketches and plans
for books he never published. Along with Dylan's Chronicles,
this book has surprise and a beautiful dogleg route down each
page, both cherishing a certain abandon and landing squarely
on both feet in rhythm and content On the shelf, set it beside
Gravity's Rainbow.

It's all about her persistence that I love about Ruth
Stone's poetry - now almost blind, or at least having
a time with it, she is writing some of the best poetry of her
life and at least two handsome books have come in the last few
years. In the Dark (Copper Canyon) is the latest.
It may be a little too long with a few poems sounding alike but
just as I say this to myself I find most of Stone's strength
is her involvement that involves you. Whoever edited the book
knew to put this gem smack in the middle of the collection just
when your mind and eye might be tiring -

INTERIM

Like the radiator that sits

in the kitchen passing gas;

like the mop with its head

on the floor, weeping;

or the poinsettia that pretends

its leaves are flowers;

the cheap paint peels

off the steamed walls.

When you have nothing to say,

the sadness of things

speaks for you,

There are a million literary tricks of pun, image, forced
metaphor, alliteration

and this poet forever and again tosses it all and keeps it
all maintained by a

sincerity to die for -

WALTER, UPON LOOKING AROUND

"Men are getting extinct,"

says my grandson, Walter.

"Look how little I am;

and I'm the only boy in the family.

I hardly ever see a boy,"

he says, warming to his subject.

Like Robert Sund, Ruth Stone is one of our best kept secrets.
Best shared.

Here is something quite remarkable that came through the mail
- a deluxe copy of Bone/Hueso, the illustrated
booklet featuring the bilingual poetry ofHoward McCord.
The creator of such is one Adrian Tio Diaz,
illustrator extraordinaire (cut linoleum block prints) from Hare
of the Dog Press (www.haredogpress.com) who has elegantly
matched McCord's own poems that he has written in both English
and Spanish. Of course precious few were made, masterpiece built
as it is, but enough to sell: the first 26 copies (A to Z) come
as a lettered deluxe format in hand structured box that will
keep you involved admiring it long before you slide out the books.
The remaining numbers of the total 80 made (27-80) contain one
book inside a more modest slipcase. But knowing this outfit,
expect to be dazzled. Rare Book Collections seem to be sweeping
them up; if you are of that ilk (a chosen), go immediately past
Go and inquire. A must for McCord readers. Ditto small press,
touchy-feely lovely papers finicky colophon sweeping reader geeks.
Of which, I am often one.

My back's starting to act up. Kerosene going down in the heater.
Woodstoves are inside the house awful warm (I just fetched an
apple & more water), and the 4th World Series game is on
in an hour - let me note, with pleasure, one more book: I much
enjoyed volume one but volume two of The Selected Letters
of Tennessee Williams 1946-1957 (New Directions) takes
the reader on a cruise through probably the highest intensity
of the writer's career: Streetcar, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof and Baby Doll sort of intensity. The gentlemanly
scholarship of Williams has always been attractive, combined
with an underworld in the conservative 1950s where he remains
one of the champs left standing. He says it best: Here is
my program: have a complete change this summer, go to Japan and
Hong-Kongand so forth. In the Fall, take up residence again in
New Orleans, and start analysis there if I still feel I need
it and there is a good analyst there. Try to kick the liquor
habit or cut down on it. I'm not an alcoholic, I almost never
get drunk, but I do drink too much and my working hours in the
morning are affected by resulting hang-overs and depression.
Cultivate a cooler, more objective attitude toward my work, and
recapture some of my earlier warmth and openness in relation
to people, which began to go when I began to be famous.

An honest man. Deserves another -

August 9, 2004 was the 150th anniversary of the publication
of Walden

In 1854, when Walden was first published, the book was
largely ignored. It took five years to sell out the first printing
of two thousand copies. It was not until 1862, the year of Thoreau's
death, that the book was brought back into print. Since then
it has never been out of print, and it has been published in
hundreds of editions and translated into virtually every modern
language. for more, contact The Walden Woods Project(www.walden.org)

- Bob Arnold

nothing matters but the quality

of the affection

- Ezra Pound

WOODBURNERS WE
RECOMMEND - AUTUMN EQUINOX 2004

A leap - and my mind is
whole - Osip Mandelstam

Truth? A pebble of quartz?
For once, then, something - Robert Frost

To write means to construct
language, not to explain it - Max Bense

Traditional music is too
unreal to die - songs about roses growing out of

people's brains and lovers
who are geese and swans who turn into angels -Bob Dylan

- in memory of all of us -

axis: making a connection to another by
way of the reading text

I walked up to a brakeman

to give him a line of talk,

he says if you've got the money

I'll see that you don't walk.

- Jimmie Rodgers

Both Jim (Koller) and I make a living
working with our hands - building and landscape work - and we
also write poems and have edited literary magazines. It's no
big deal. Others have done it. Speaking for myself, writing poems
and hand labor are both one, they work off one another, and combining
the editing of a poetry journal are the things I love to do.
The hand labor earns a pay check, but moreso it earns the poems
I write, and the editing derives from a literary enjoyment of
gathering poets into the same pages, no matter their poetic landscape;
the poems simply have to be good. Not just good to me, but good
for poetry. Like when you hear a Woody Guthrie song, that's good.
Bad is easy to smell. It's the same idea Whitman lit into our
heads when he wrote "who touches this book touches a man"
- we've heard it a hundred times, but how many have you read?
How many even get published? I try to find these poems built
into such a book, and when I find them I want to put them into
other hands.

Robert Frost wrote good poems in his early
years, they were poems that felt lived-in, and curiously read
as if they were written before Frost knew what he was doing -
which doesn't mean he was ignorant - rather what Olson said,
"we do what we know before we know what we do." Later,
when the world ate him up and gave him 4 Pulitzer prizes the
poems have already suffered from too much pollination; they had
become only poems, down right expected of him. That treatment
would kill anything that bleeds. My point is that his early poems
talked a real talk, made a poem sing/made the reader sing, brightened
the eyes to a connection of life and words. And to find these
words you have to hunt, become a reader - a doer - and one good
book will always steer you to at least one more good book, and
finally to the man Whitman knows you can touch. In these essays
when I write of the outsider I'm thinking of the writer with
no easy definition or identity, call him what you want. It is
Montaigne who is always reminding me, "The reader who is
not willing to give an hour is not willing to give anything."
What isn't explained in these essays is yours to find - it's
out the door, the tip of an ear to a sound, and how much you
really do want to find. Don't kid yourself.

...Poets put into poems what they do. My feeling
is that the less they do, the more literary tricks show up -
gumballs, forced language, because they're-poets-and-they-must-write-a-poem!
Spare us.

I have a photograph near my desk of Van Wyck
Brooks and Jaime de Angulo, it's a favorite of mine. Brooks is
wearing a sweater, tie, and suitcoat standing proud into the
eyes of the camera. de Angulo is on horseback in a ragged shirt
looking sideways from the camera. What a meeting of the minds!
eastern establishment shaking hands with western soil, reminds
me of Emerson seeking out John Muir in the Sierra. Like Emerson,
Van Wyck Brooks had a generous mind; it was a mind that stayed
open, hung on the lip of vulnerability, took chances, and because
of that nerve both achieved more than most American literary
historians in finding the gist and flesh of our literature. Brooks
went looking for Jaime de Angulo because he knew de Angulo -like
any good writer - must first live away from the pages of his
writing. I first read Jim Koller as a teenager, looked him up
and published him in my twenties...we've been visiting, working,
talking, sharing things ever since.

I wrote the above - taken from a much longer
essay called A Line of Talk - nearly 20 years ago and
I wouldn't change a word, shift my tone, nor move from my position
one iota. It was all part of a conversation between Jim Koller
and me and we're still having this conversation, and I'm sure
whoever leaves the earth first I guarantee the conversation between
us will continue. Jim's new book of poems Snows Gone
By, new & uncollected poems 1964-2002 (La AlamedaPress)
is filled with a certain passion, Koller style - not gushy, not
even worded all that much, but an explicable aura of never surrender.
Ghosts of loved ones stay with the ghosts of those alive, there
just is no difference, and each poem is made as if by a hand-tool
motion. If you are used to your poetry all gussied up with complete
formation then be prepared to work, because half the time after
a Koller poem you are left with just yourself - not the doctorate
self, the educated self or the public self; rather the private,
hidden, squirreled into a ball self which is forever begging
just to be set free. Well here is your chance. Come meet poems
said to children (the poet's may as well be yours), hooted back
to birds and fur beasts (some of his best friends), blessed over
plains and prairies (where the poet was born) washed out with
the Pacific and Atlantic tides (been his homes) and just imagine
a poet in this day and age having the audacity and perseverance,
at nearly the age of 70, collecting 38 years of his poetry -
and his last major collection was 30 years ago - all into a book
a bit over 100 pages long. So much, so much left on the floor
and on the road. I'm telling you, you don't want to live without
this book. The day it arrived I spent just the first day looking
at the tiniest and blurred photograph of a coyote tucked down
and trotting through on the very last page. The poems would wait.
We took the road up as far as it went

axis:Bill
Brown

Gary Snyder's new
book of poemshas a photograph, of a sort, that sums up
much of his dominion and place these last 50 years in poetry:
the blown roof top of Mount St. Helens, heavy with snow, and
not at all the same mountain the poet snapped in his own photograph
way back in 1945 : a pleated ridge, August snow-deep wonder.
There is a selection from the Snyder text chosen by the publisher
of Danger On Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard) for the full
back cover of the book that I hadn't noticed or cared to read
but did notice after my reading it was the very same paragraph
I circled from my reading as one of the many highlights of the
book - Snyder at 15 years of age, the first atomic bombs in any
age had been dropped on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki and the young
poet is in the backcountry hiking and oblivious to it. The first
photographs of the bombs after-world didn't reach the Portland
Oregonian until a few days later, and when hiking out of
the woods to a lodge to catch up on news from the community bulletin
board it seems the poet, rebel, teacher, patriot Gary Snyder
was born: The morning sun on my shoulders, the fir forest
smell and the big tree shadows; feet in thin moccasins feeling
the ground, and my heart still one with the snowpeak mountain
at my back. Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and
the government of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something
like :By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens,
I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who
would seek to use it, for all my life." And god dammit,
wouldn't you know he'd live up to that pledge. For anyone coming
to Snyder for the first time you can start with any book, he's
that consistent; like 5 shovels on a wall. Grab one. For seasoned
readers, this book will act like a hodgepodge of a sort but we
all know better - there's grit of muscle and intelligence - and
no matter that he has never been too convincing to me trying
his hand at the very short poem - he just can't help himself
at being too wordy, too preachy, and a little too wooded where
he means to be floating. His roommates once upon a time from
Reed College (Welch and Whalen) were much finer hands at it,
though this remains Snyder's best book at letting his hair down.
The haibun passages are quite elegant, the reflective journal-poetry-hiking
pages spanning decades are fully companionable, and many of the
later poems of life hold forth a lovely tenderness about often
'nothing' at all, to the fast close-up death of a loved one.
In Snyder he means for you to feel every inch. And, of course,
the 'nothing' is merely another word for everything. I can't
think of very many poets from the woods since Thoreau who just
know how to make you all at once feel that sunshine on the back,
the presence of the mountain, and your feet touching the earth
through those thin sole moccasins. The reader is in the care
of a woodsman who drinks his coffee at Carls Jr., and like Jim
Koller (old friends) has prepared a life: part self-made-mythic
/and made-mythic: by a civilization gone wacky out of touch with
the human soul. These two poets are fierce believers of Really
the real. And I know, for a fact, they were both close to
their mothers.

axis: Nanao Sakaki

Hayden Carruth: Koller
of the Midwest birth gone wild seed blown all four directions,
Snyder of the high Sierra west, and Carruth like locust split
logs made for fencing all purpose New England...and I don't care
if he has lived the last 20 years or so in New York state, he
knows as well as any of us he left in Vermont, he is from
Vermont. His best poems were written here. The farmers and halfwits
he sincerely loved came from here, and he salvaged years of madness
before-hand by making a quiet home on a lopsided hill with a
likable brook that ran by, and just imagine he wrote his poems
and bucked out many book reviews and hack work from a studio
he renovated from an old cow shed. He worked in there all night
and came to sleep at dawn and all I remember best when I went
to visit him in there was a well used box Herald woodstove and
a postcard photograph of Ezra Pound tacked on the wall. The creamy
lighting and cave wall of books are now a blur. To the photographer
who took the author's photograph of Hayden in his new book Letters
To Jane (Ausable Press / www.ausablepress.org) my compliments,
for catching just the sweetness, as well as the long yard of
pain and heartache of the man's demeanor and in the eyes, because
this clutch of a book is going to give the reader a boatload
of the same. "Jane," of the letters, is Jane Kenyon,
who to a whole other league of readers is better know than Hayden
Carruth for her lyrical poetry and translations of Anna Akhmatova.
Except Hayden wrote these letters and only Hayden would think
to write these letters - massively devotional and skilled at
writing both a day-book entry and treasured nougat love poem.
Kenyon is slowly dying and at the same hour the poet's only daughter
is being treated for her own cancer (which will take her) and
Carruth is never silly to worry is he being mixed up as friend,
father, neighbor or lover...he comes as a whole. For younger
readers, and a moment of perspective, if Jack Kerouac were alive
today he would be one year younger than Hayden Carruth. A poet
who has spanned from parts of the greatest era of American poetry
(HD, Pound, Williams, Zukofsky) and been muddied up himself in
so many cross currents of relationships of poets - he seems to
make his pals between woods hermits to citylight starlets in
the trade - but after all seems the happiest being at home, tending
to his yard, the comfort of a loved one as woman or dog and cat,
any straggler, and having his computer keyboard plunked down
on his lap where he keeps office and composes these johnny appleseed
robust wonders called letters. But they're really all-poem. Written
to one-and-only-one woman who is dying way too young, and how
it is killing Hayden, will kill you too. Hang on, my dear.
We have need of thee.

axis: George Dennison

Jonathan Greene: now we come to Kentucky, by way of a city boy childhood
(NYC) and cutting one's teeth from Bard College to California
where connections are made very young for this poet with other
printers, poets, typographers of the 1960s -a wild spirit growing
in the air - to a solid grounding with Renaissance types Victor
and Carolyn Hammer back in Kentucky where this bird would decide
to settle. On the Banks of Monk's Pond (www.broadstonebooks.com)
is a little jewelry box of a book, less than 60 pages, that details
patiently one young poet's sojourn into the Kentucky wilderness
of poets, writers, book designers but particularly Greene's young
ways and wisdom and instinct tap to work with Thomas Merton in
the last year or so of the monk's life when he was wanting to
edit Monk's Pond (four issues and four issues only) gathering
up some of the roughage from a very feisty American and international
poetry scene ranging widely from the serene (Wendell Berry) to
the experimental (Robert Lax). Greene seems to think many of
these poets and such were "an outlet for Merton's enthusiasms"
in exploratory writing and photography. No doubt about it viewing
Merton's poetry and photography during these last years where
he was holed up in a cinder block hermitage preparing for his
Asian journey, keeping to his monastery duties, and upholding
what is now known as a monster literary and religious discipline.
He still was able to steal away some time at the hermitage and
listen to Pharaoh Sanders with young Jonathan and fiddle together
plans for their journal. It is everlasting if you can get your
hands on any copies of what was basically sent around free, or
from the compendium that published all four issues and maybe
something more, I haven't looked at it for years. This is the
correspondence, tiny flash in the pan, between two that put their
heads together. A wallet size assembly of photographs by both
Merton and Lax seed the text. Also from the same publisher in
the same year comes Fault Lines, poems by Greene revealing
a consistency now 40 years since his step into Kentucky. If anything,
his poetry has become pared down and cleaner, more trusting of
the line and suspension, gladly painting himself into a corner
and allowing his ever wit and language strokes to get him places.

Mother's Tree

Buried my mother

under a maple -

the maple died.

Cut it out and planted

a tulip poplar,

which also died.

Today mowing this pasture,

a healthy bald cypress

now shades her bones.

Has earth come to terms

with this permanent guest?

I wrote Jonathan that while reading this excellent
new book, no dips, I fell into a sound sleep midway through.
Summer day, loft, windows cross-breezed and only trees as my
company. It was meant as an absolute compliment. Sure-footed
poems this sound and intriguing do it to me every time. The
trials were hidden

axis: William Bronk

I've no idea what to tell you about Open
Eye by Marcia Roberts except it was sent to me out
of the blue by Skanky Possum (2925 Higgins St.,Austin, Texas
78722) which is a high octane press run by two poets and companions
Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen and while there is a rather clumsy
to my ears introduction by Tom Clark referring to all things
literary and historical and a quite credible overview to the
poems....in this case I was happiest just taking the poems as
they came to me: electric, scant, visual, remarkably inventive
in my hands as if heard that moment by the poet reading aloud,
earthy, found, abbreviated, dreaming blue and needing no introduction.
As Whitney Balliett once called jazz the sound of surprise,
so is every page of this book.

axis: certainly Ed Dorn but I'm going with
Barbara Moraff

Let's take a moment - a few weeks ago an order
came through the bookshop for Gael Turnbull's A Trampoline.
Only one copy left - and going to a good home - I let it go but
not before reading it again and coming upon this poem I always
liked. And I'll like it a third time for your benefit.

FOR A FRIEND

I fell asleep

reading your new book

at ease in the sun

by a mountain stream

listening to the current

as to your words :

the currency of the phrases,

the concurrence of the thought.

It's one of life's pleasures

to be able to doze off,

to read your poems,

to hear your voice,

to sleep when tired,

to wake refreshed.

- Gael Turnbull from A Trampoline poems
1952-1964 (Cape Goliard)

John Martone is the editor and publisher of
tel-let (jophilmar@yahoo.com) as well as
the forester for the world of Frank Samperi's poetry, and good
gardener of his own many and many more small books of poems.
I can easily count 24 books and probably a few others tucked
into another shelf here but these 24 have now been gathered under
one roof in the book dogwood & honeysuckle (redmoon@shentel.net)
and so if you have missed the limited print run of these little
numbers, today is your lucky day -

firefly

& moon

at once

~

what

this ant

carries

off

glints

~

no eyeglasses

no telling daughters

from daylight

~

this clear

day takes

all my

clothespins

As always, it's up to the reader to prepare.
These are poems spun.

axis: yes, Samperi

a correction from the last W'burner:

Gleanings & Fragments: heads-up (thank you, Dale) to a monthly wrap-up of
books, films, music and all things interesting from Kim
Dorman 1508 A Woodlawn, Austin, TX. 78703 who has recently
returned to the United States after some years in India with
his family and finding hidden poets of Austin, sleeper films
and music and a general keen eye to what makes his month tick,
tick, tick. I love it all..

Howlin' Wolf: Moanin' At Midnight, the
life and times of Howlin' Wolf by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman
(Pantheon) - like approaching any
wolf, look around first. Notice the back cover blurb by longtime
Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin states in full "Things folks
have done in the dark are going to come out in the light. Nobody
else has ever dug up what these guys have found - and it's right."
This is the same guitarist who had been stomped on by Howlin'
Wolf, left to play with Muddy Waters and always came back for
more, and the more is what Sam Phillips described as "where
the soul of man never dies", the actual sound of
Howlin Wolf when he sang, if that's what it was. Standing 6'
5" at 260 pounds, with blue eyes and "black velvety
skin. It looked like it would ripple if you blow on it"
as described by bluesman Johnny Shines. One of the many things
going right for this outstanding biography is the story and personality
are powerful, the writers are skilled, and the Rolling Stones
don't make it into the book until 2/3rds of the way in. For once,
the "undergrowth," as Wolf may have called it, is all
Black. Rural Mississippi, Charlie Patton's guiding shadow, poverty
and crushing hardships, killing another man with a cotton hoe,
brutal segregation - in fact it was called lynching, throughout
his youth - and speaking his life story and thus music further
out of the south, hard scrabble farming and up the chute from
the Delta to Chicago. At the age of 55, Wolf would make the first
network tv appearance for any Chicago blues star, fronted by
the Rolling Stones. They insisted he be there, as they insisted
his songs (and Muddy Waters) be on their albums, which put one
rendition of Chicago blues in millions of white homes worldwide
thanks to their teenage children. Known as the bluesman who would
not quit. Listen to Dylan and he is there, PJ Harvey and he is
there, Megadeth he is there. But listen to Howlin Wolf (it can
overpower any music at anytime in any music store play list)
and it's no surprise Chester Burnett would have been named after
a president of the United States.

axis: Can't Be Satisfied, the life and
times of Muddy Waters by Robert Gordon

It's always by chance I find a Richard
Meltzer book and each time after I have forgotten about him
for some years and then there is another book, looking somehow
odd, and maybe just because of the association of his name on
the spine, I can't get used to seeing what I know is in store
for the reader looking all tame and properly shelved. This man
belongs in a cage. His writings should be on audio tape and drilled
into the brains of our enemies and we may watch all wars subside
(the enemy may kill himself). Autumn Rhythm (Da Capo)
just might be his best book and that only works after reading
every one of his other books trailing out a firestorm and coming
to this conclusion in the twilight of his so-called career. He's
had a zillion wannabes try to write like him with no success,
and he has likewise probably had to listen to way too many tell
him he just might be the next Bukowski. Poor devil. Why be anything
but a Meltzer since he does it so well? Who else but Meltzer,
when paging through the book and landing on the sexy stuff, it
happens to be a frenzied fantasy the writer is having with his
own mother. Of course she is at a certain age, she is wearing
just the right clothes, hair, walk...and then no surprise near
the end of the book the author interviews his elderly ma now
living in Woodstock, NY., with all the candor and care of the
best bedside manner. The freaks like him because he is a wild
man, limiting his audience, whereas I find his appeal in his
heartless heartfelt wonder - just read his essay on the impending
death of his cat. Eliot would have loved it. Buk, Burroughs,
Kerouac all cat people too, would have been charmed. I know of
no writer today who can burn you, drown you and revive you in
the same instant. If F. Scott Fitzgerald didn't go to Princeton
and instead landed wild-eyed in the 60s, thankfully survived
and became a geezer to write his Crack-up, this book would
be it. Scholars take note. Past / Imagine not having one.

Now what a pickle we are in. We have an absolute
idiot for a president, spawned by a glucose of company men and
one battleax, who quite easily duped the whole country into his
shanghaiing this highest office, and if that wasn't enough duped
us all again with something called 9/11 which was one of the
more spotless "terrorist" acts in histiory: buildings
fall-down, clean 'em up, mainly non-executives die and every
one but everyone eats it up like shortnin' bread because who
else on earth couldhave done such a thing? that is,
if you don't use your imaginationand pay attention to
who received the best advantages afterwards: an idiot now resides
as commander & chief, a rat mayor becomes a hero, a bodybuilder
is falling-in next in line...media bought, democrats dead in
the water having hustled right into the gas chamber of yes-war
and yes-patriot-act aligning up with the fierce country's loyalty
fueled on fear, prejudice and the polls...don't forget the polls...the
media big business feeds there, so you do. Bless yourself. Turn
off the tv and open a book of poetry. Put on some music. Help
a hurricane victim; it's about the closest you are ever going
to get to helping someone as the news spools for days on end
a storm surge blown up the streets of Mobile Alabama in the same
media context that could really show you, for the same length
of time, 20,000 dead from around the world in Iraq. None of us
any longer belong to anything. You're either rich, or you're
fantasizing. If there is impending death in your life or family,
you're busy. We're looking miserable. Real books used to be really
written and really published and really reviewed, and supported.
Now poets complain no one knows they are alive. Poets that seem
to think they are alive form little governments and run in a
pack and all that they ask is that you absolutely never ever
never criticize their work, in fact it is best that you write
like them. Familiar is essential. Not making sense is imperative.
Soon the poets, politicians, media, music and big-business goons
will all be the same. Those riding bicycles, using hand-saws,
greeting you with good manners, tuning a banjo, will be easily
kicked aside. And to think at one time we were divided over war
and peace and should have learned our lesson. What is worse,
the very same fuckers that did it then are doing it again after
we tried to rebuild this land is your landthis land
is my land and knew that hard work and an open mind and a
freedom for all was of course the very cornerstone of a good
people and land. It wasn't any name calling "liberal"
or "conservative", it was lusciously called human.
Why make it impossible? Why let the fuckers win?

...so that's how I think when I stand in a
bookstore, and okay, I have most what I can afford and want anymore
from the poetry section but I know for a fact there is so much
more out there and then I see it...the spine is different...there's
something spacious and unique and warming, homing me toward it.
A Tall, Serious Girl by George Stanley (Qua Books, 211 Conanicus
Ave., Jamestown, RI. 02835) for someone who has read quite
a bit of poetry this book is an absolute goldmine. George Stanley...George
Stanley?... wasn't he connected with Spicer and Robert Duncan
once upon a time? You bet. American moved to Canada long ago
(1965)? Yes, but I think he is Canadian. Well, now he
is, but he started out born in San Francisco slumming with that
wonderful bohemian tide of once upon a time, he didn't quite
click and scooted to Canada (bohemians there too), became a citizen,
taught, wrote, published lovely books not seen so readily in
the states (I always saw Purdy, Bowering, Persky even, and Blaser
of course, more than Stanley) and then he kept things interesting
and became a citizen of Ireland as well. Like it took the Rolling
Stones (or Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield depending
on your version) to find Howlin Wolf; it took the team of editors
Kevin Davies and Larry Fagin, plus the editors of this press
- Michael Gizzi and Craig Watson - all Jagger &Richards -
to make this splendid book. By far the finest selected poems
(1957-2000) that I've read in years. Of a poet who is brilliantly
kicking out the jams with some sort of eternal energy and grace.
Each page (each page!) tickles with the run of a chipmunk that
makes my dog run and run. This is what it was like the first
time I read Niedecker and Pound. First love, welcome back. The
print run is only 1,000 in cloth. The last poem of the book "Veracruz"
(but don't cheat and rush to it, come to it like you should)
is worth more than the price of money. The book is to die-for;
honor any bookseller who has the good sense to stock it.

Now, to be a person like anyone else /
terrifies me

axis: The Granite Pail, Lorine Niedecker

- B o b A
r n o l d

Almost a year ago, on the second anniversary
of 9/11, I predicted "an ugly, bitter campaign - probably
the nastiest of modern American history." The reasons I
gave then still apply. President Bush has no positive achievements
to run on. Yet his inner circle cannot afford to see him lose:
if he does, the shroud of secrecy will be lifted, and the public
will learn the truth about cooked intelligence, profiteering,
politicization of homeland security and more.

- Paul Krugman on The Rambo Coalition
NYTimes 29 Aug 04

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND
- AUTUMNAL 2004

in memory of

Thom Gunn

Czeslaw Milosz

Poetry is like faith -it isn't meant to be understood
but to be received in a state of grace ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Built By Hand by Bill Steen, Athena Steen
& Eiko Komatsu with photographs by Yoshio Komatsu (Gibbs
Smith 2003): here is a shrimped-down size art book - but only
in height - with a whole lot of gimmie. Starting off how one
can roll oneself up into a sleeping ball under the shade of a
tree-as shelter-this book follows around the world some of the
finest examples of shelters made by hand with simple tools, local
materials, personal and varied touches according to custom and
often modest lifestyles. Homes made by homesteaders that are
as rocked down rooted, as movable. A full reading and view of
this book and one can't but know what possibilities structure
and harmony may have. Some of my favorite locations are stone
houses built within or between rocks in Monsanto, Portugal. Some
of the largest wooden houses built in the world from Indonesia
formed with mythic joinery, lime wash decorations on structures
from Yemen and Slovakia, an entire village in Spain tucked under
the natural protection of a cliff with an orchard of trees swept
above it all. Beauty on every page.

Jimi Hendrix: A pity we're alive to listen
to him, and he's not. Electric Ladyland by John Perry (Continuum/www.continuumbooks.com)
if you already have three Hendrix recordings (or 300) and are
moving to buy a fourth, take the $10 instead and pick up this
nutshell book of how his third studio album was made, by guitarist/writer
Perry who lives in London and whose head seems screwed on pretty
tight - he neither wanted to fuck Hendrix or compete with him,
just love him. As stated, in the four years Hendrix's star burned
and a legacy made, in the hands of his contemporaries it brings
Dylan to Highway 61 (not a bad spot), The Beatles to Revolver,
The Rolling Stones to about Aftermath, whereas Hendrix is about
complete. He didn't need to play with Miles Davis, being music
row he simply stole the trumpeter's young wife for awhile. Like
other self-taught Americans - Frost, Pound come to mind - Hendrix
had to travel to England to be appreciated even after serving
in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam after being picked up in 1961
in a stolen car as a teen in Seattle. Thought of as a freak in
Harlem in the early 60s, one can hear Hendrix today on backup
Isley Brothers and Don Covay (Mercy,Mercy) standards, and midway
reading this little book you're going to be pulling off the shelf
Paris 1966 Olympia Theater live recordings, if you know what's
good for you, and play it loud. It's outrageous to think that
Robert Christgau at the time of Hendrix's appearance at Monterey
Pop (1967) wrote, "He was terrible" when watched then
(and now on crystal clear restored dvd) he stole all the shows
except for Ravi Shankar. His two favorite guitar slingers were
Buddy Guy and Albert King and the scat singing tempo and torching
bursts of the latter we all bow our heads to. This is the best
capsulized 100 or so pages ever written on the late & great
"Jimmy James".

I keep the Hendrix rolling - better than watching
the Olympics, with as many tv commercials as events - and opened
up Art Burn by guerrilla poster artist Robbie Conal (RDV Books/www.akashicbooks.com)
who professes "there are too many bad guys and much too
little time" but in 1997 he was given space in LA Weekly
once a month to slop down his brutal talents of making creeps
look creepier, or as Kurt Vonnegut likes to call them "psychopathic
personalities". Crayon in hand, Conal brings forth his poster
street art credentials to full nasty flower. It's a toss-up whether
his Monica or John Rocker hits the best mark but his Cheney is
truly edifying. Required reading from now until November. The
publisher has supplied a newsprint fore edge where you swear
your fingers have to be inked up when done thumbing through.
If you want to understand why you're feeling so poorly, look
no further. Done in large-size format, some in color, all spooky.

While we're down in the muck (& moving
on the turntable to Jimmy Rushing's, Every Day I Have the Blues)
: Hunter S. Thompson's, Hey Rube (Simon & Schuster) He's
never going to write another Hell's Angels or Las Vegas masterpiece,
so forget it, but these sports articles of a sort from 2000-2003
are like eating so many animal crackers all at once so I recommend
reading bits & pieces each night, say before bedtime as I
have, and sleep like a lion. Dividing his energies between NFL
blood sport and the Bush doctrine he attempts with all Duke reserve
to fight against the Churchillian, "The first casualty of
War is always the Truth." Correct 99% of the time post 9-11,
but not here. Snap it up. The best 'sports book' since Doug Peacock's
Grizzly Years.

I don't know much about Ministers of Fun at
National Poetry Slams but Gary Mex Glazner is supposed to be
one and before that he was a florist for 18 years in California
until one of his flowers (honestly) told him to sell the business
since he wanted to be a poet, anyway. With the money he gave
himself "a grant" (good man) and with his wife traveled
the world over 34,229 miles to find out what makes poets tick.
The front cover of Ears on Fire (La Alameda) will pull you in
- it's a photograph of our minister of fun in front of Paris's
enfant terrible bookshop Shakespeare and Company buried in a
soaking color of real books. Basically the book starts in the
far east and keeps you there awhile, as it did the earliest adventurers.
I fell for the guy's sincerity, the publisher's wonderful layout
of poems and illustrations, and the overwhelming unSlamlike gloss
for a farmer in the Himalayas knowing with a wave from his field
work the ever popular Nepal poet Devkota, or that while in Vietnam
the oral tradition of blind men singing poems at ferry crossings
or in markets is still very much alive. We have our own here
if we care to listen. I like any florist who by the end of the
book should realize he was always a poet, amongst the good earth.
Come and meet his world survivors. sandal maker poets: (Stavros)
Melissinos had sold sandals to everyone from the Beatles to Sophia
Loren. When his children asked why he didn't get the Beatles
autographs, he said, "Why should I ?They come to see me."

I had other new books but had to return them
to either a library or owners: on Fellini (about himself and
his films and world), Cindy Sherman (some of her self photographs
in wigs and costume from hotels and deserts were made by her
father, back when she would travel with her parents...I sort
of like the image) describing many of her locations; a gorgeous
retrospective on Gerhardt Richter and his vast range of paintings
from abstract explorations to breath caught realism...his area
of locating privacy is uncanny; to wanting the new Howlin Wolf
biography, to not yet finding the Gary Snyder Danger On Peaks
(no luck in two university towns) but being notified through
the grapevine that it is indeed out...and not wanting to substitute
it for the wall of MFA crap that bloats too many once fine poetry
sections of bookstores. Who are the buyers for these stores?
Teach them a lesson - good poetry is right under their noses.
Buy local, there's almost always an intriguing unknown poet in
every town. And what is your own local, may be another region's
star.

Another goodie from La Alameda, a press in
New Mexico I have long cherished but have recently heard may
be pulling up stakes. The quickest letters to my Woodburners
are detractors so if there is an update, and hopefully better
news about this very attractive press, I should hear shortly.
On the plus side, books designed this fine and with splendid
authors will be around in stores and used shops and in our libraries
for generations. Count on it. I had picked up Trilogy by the
Finn poet Pentti Saarikoski (La Alameda) in the newish Tattered
Cover Bookstore across from the Union Station train yard in Denver
while waiting for a train one evening, probably the best waiting-room
in the country - three floors, comfortable chairs, every new
book bubbling to the surface and maybe a reading is going on
in their almost devotional small auditorium for such where photographs
of many poets who have appeared are on the walls. I began sitting
down with Saarikoski, rinsed with a rainwater translation by
Anselm Hollo who has been doing this sort of thing for generations
now - often digging up the very best of poetries around the world
for us (thank you). Saarikoski was one of those Europeans as
big as life it seems - married four times, a radical spokesman
for the Generation of '68, he left behind at his death twenty
years ago, twenty-two books of poems, radio plays, a handful
of prose books and seventy books translated into Finnish from
classical Greek, European and English wonders. He was dead by
age 45. At the time he wrote Trilogy, which is made up of three
separate books ranging from 1977-1983, the author had withdrawn
from a very active public lifestyle in the cultural/political
swim of things to an old house on an island off the west coast
of Sweden, with his wife and a landscape as described by Hollo,
"cultivated his own backyard in a typically troll-like way,
superimposing the rich and various, wild and woolly landscape
of his mind on the surrounding countryside with its low mountain
ridges, petroglyphs, caves, and harbors." This best describes
the dailiness of Saarikoski's walking-talking mind. Pure poetry.
The dead have a name / the living a face and ten fingers

Better for the lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp,
plus the two essays by W.G. Sebald and Andrea Kohler, the poems
by Sebald are a disappointment and seem quite slight compared
to his other writings, or poets who are much sharper and natural
at this sort of thing - Bronk, Corman, Samperi, Taggart - we
seem caught up in a manipulation of anything-Sebald still fresh
from his traffic accident early death and surge of popularity.
Unrecounted (New Directions) can be read, though, as a unique
ensemble between two long held friends since childhood, visuals
& voice. At the end / only so many will / remain as / can
sit round / a drum

Another small press to think good tidings
for is Fence Books (www.fencebooks.com)

who openly declare they are on a mission to
support young writers & unknowns who might otherwise be left
out in the cold because their work doesn't form to a certain
school or clique, popular form of experimentation or the god
awful mainstream...which this accepted experimentation seems
to be becoming. I wrote away for six books and all six books
were freely sent and I so freely have returned publications from
Longhouse in the old tradition of a cup of sugar neighborly borrowed.
I can't say I was thrilled by all six books - pieces of many
certainly - all of Elizabeth Robinson's Apprehend, a very tidy,
imaginative and balanced made poetry, plus the diverse jump and
snap imagery of The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems by Tina
Brown Celona, some of the best tiny outrages since Bill Knott
are here. Each Fence Book is a flat 12 dollars, handsomely designed
gatefold softcover, begging to be read. What is bitter and what
is / finally caught in the same sentence (ER)

Another wonderful small press and long in
the tooth and memorable for the fact it is still kicking strong
- Limberlost Press (www.LimberLostpress.com) who have kindly
traded books with me since the early 70s and if I remember correctly
it was first a thin book of poems by mutual friend John Clellon
Holmes. Times may change but this fraternity hasn't and in the
small press world, or small-anything- world, without this you
ain't doing it right. You may be famous, you may be cheered and
talk only about yourself but it's all plainly bad manners. So
even though its tale ran through me like water, Waltzing With
the Captain: remembering Richard Brautigan by Greg Keeler (Limberlost)
got to me straight away in the author's introduction where he
wisely acknowledges many readers and fans of Brautigan's work
are possessive about their own impressions of the author and
aren't about to come willingly into a memoir written by a drinking
buddy from Montana who became the designated driver for a cultural
icon who was falling to pieces, at best, when they met in 1978.
By 1984, gun-happy Brautigan would put a bullet into himself,
depressing legions of friends and poets who at least were always
trying to root for him. A far cry from his early days of the
latter Beat era when the young poet was publishing his own poems
on seed packets, rising to the rank of popular Hesse books found
in backpacks of the late 60s with Brautigan's unique looking
book jackets of the author with various women friends, collectible
at this very moment. By the time Keeler meets our hero, Keeler's
wife wants nothing to do with this new friend -she knows a pest
when she sees one - and the relish of the tale is bouncing around
with these two guys, one dying on the vine from pure American
extravagance meets neglect, and the other is smart enough to
tell the tale like it is. He knows Brautigan's daughter Ianthe
wrote a better memoir, so did his old friend Keith Abbot, and
William Hjortsberg is presently writing the official biography.
But don't miss this clubhouse tale, sad as it is. With family
album style photographs. I'm distracted by how he (RB) and Aki
would follow his favorite high school girls' basketball team
around the small towns of Montana.

DVD: Roots of Tex-Mex Music: Chulas Fronteras
& Del Mero Corazon two films by Les Blank and Chris Strachwitz
(Arhoolie www.arhoolie.com) little masterpieces from the right
hands who know the field, people and music of this border culture
and more. Featuring Flaco Jimenez (in his prime), Lydia Mendoza,
Conjunto Tamaulipas plus further footage and music from concerts,
festivals and family gatherings. At this point Arhoolie Records
should be cited as a national treasure for ground-breaking skills
well over 40 years. Les Blank, too. Two classics right under
our noses.

BACK TO THE LANDS: kudos to Ted Kooser for
his appointment as US Poet Laureate - it's about time the Plains
rose up again.

In Praise of Fertile Land edited by Claudia
Mauro (Whit Press, whitpress@aol.com)

a poetry anthology in partnership between
the land and the reader - all royalties from the sale of the
book feed directly into programs that preserve our remaining
farmlands. The anthology has already been a contributor in saving
a 174 acre farm in Washington State. Contributors include Wendell
Berry, William Stafford, Lucille Clifton, Maxine Kumin, Bob Arnold,
David Budbill & others.

Stanford University Libraries has just issued
a stunning collection of writings from the golden age of Yosemite
climbing (1933-1974) Ordeal By Piton edited by Steve Roper bundled
rope tight with photographs and illustrations and selected by
a climber brings a readership through the eyes of David Brower,
Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt, Warren Harding and many more blending
personal humor, climbing grace and timing through their in-the-field
reports. Sibylle Hechtel offers her essay "Walls Without
Balls" on the first all-female ascent of El Capitan in 1973
with her team member Bev Johnson. Hands-on and hanging for dear
life if ever there was a book.

Grand storyteller and poet Andy Clausen's
Trek to the Top of the World (Zeitgeist Press) is Part I to a
two or three part long poem collection composed on & about
the Solu Khumbu (Everest) trail to Gokyo-Ri. Starting with a
long haul poem "The Toughest Bus Ride of My Life",
followed through porters, sherpas, and Clausen's ever eagle-eye
to things balanced and off-balanced. This is poetry written with
its boots on, a cutter of suave path & figure.

Ah, my find of the summer, and pointed out
to my true love who wondered what I might like for a birthday
gift, and this is it - Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Steidl/Fuel)
photographs, drawings and text are all part of a personal collection
of over 3,000 tattoos gathered up over a lifetime by prison attendant
Danzig Baldaev who worked the tattoos secret world as his map
and entry into recording personalities, tribal languages and
rituals of a Russian closed society. Printed in Germany, Russians
all behind it, and affordable in cloth edition.

Gleanings & Fragments: heads-up (thank
you, Dale) to a monthly wrap-up of books, films, music and all
things interesting from Kim Densmore 1508 A Woodlawn, Austin,
TX. 78703 who has recently returned to the United States after
some years in India with his family and finding hidden poets
of Austin, sleeper films and music and a general keen eye to
what makes his month tick, tick, tick.

I love it all.

- Bob Arnold

Poetry doesn't need
skilled practitioners, she needs lovers, and she lays down brambles

and shards of glass
for the hands that search for her with love.

~ Federico Garcia
Lorca

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND,
SUMMERY 2004

Painting from nature is not copying the object. It
is materializing one's sensations

- Cezanne

~ In Memory of All the
Newly Fallen ~

BEGGED BORROWED & GIFTED -----------------

Here are, quickly noted, highwater marks for
this season of reading. Many have been borrowed from libraries
so should be accessible by most anyone. Precious few are affordable
in this modern age of books costing the same price as a hammer
(or two) which can go on to build not only your own house but
your childrens homes and they may inherit the hammer and never
mind this hammer can build bookcases for many thousands of books
and a roof to house everyone nicely. Catch my drift. So I have
also begged for copies of books and certainly a gift of some
book seems to make it into our home nearly every day.

Frank Conroy is
the author of Stop Time, one of the best of the Holden
Caulfield ripoffs and a nearly forgotten book of stories called
Midair but he has a thing for Nantucket in Time
& Tide - and he should- he met and fell in love with
his second wife there and managed to squirrel out a living of
sorts from playing in a jazz band to raising a barn with local
long hairs but mostly it is indeed a walk through Nantucket at
a personal pace that is most gratifying in this pleasurable read.
A slim volume as part of the "Crown Journeys" that
includes Ishmael Reed on a walk in Oakland, Michael Cunningham
walking in Provincetown, and I'm intrigued by Edwidge Danticat's
walk through carnival in Haiti, which I plan to go look for next.

Back on the mainland Kevin Mc Dermott
can take you on a guided tour from your lap and pages turning
through Elephant House or, The Home of Edward Gorey.

Gorey being a one time resident of Yarmouthport,
Cape Cod - old, side shingled, brambled hidden small mansion
of a sort filled with Gorey's beloved cats; rock, book, record,
doll and elephant collections, plus his 'television room' where
every episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" had been
videotaped and stored, much of this while the famous author sewed
Figbash dolls. McDermott is up to the task edging in both a photographic
portrait and a wise textural eye. After I put the book down,
everyone in my family went on to read it.

John Lee Anderson's biography of Che Guevara
has been well noted, and others came before and after, but Che
was much too dynamic by photographs not to believe this is the
best way to know the man you'll never know. The Che Handbook
byHilda Barrio & Gareth Jenkins - chock full
of photographs from baby Che to youngster to rebel leader/doctor
to shaved an undercover spy to murdered and forever immortal
- much of the text in Guevara's own words or by unique time-line
by both authors, plus interviews with comrades 50 years later
who fought by his side. One of my favorite photographs is Che
representing Cuba in 1964 in the XIX Assembly of the United Nations
- nonchalantly leaning against a wall waiting his turn. Tieless,
in pressed uniform, smoking a cigar (which helped his asthma)
and being completely oblivious to a square shouldered and furrowed-brow
guard at his side. Ultimate cool.

In less than 60 small pages I believe Susan
Thackery has written the best book one might want to
read on the poetry and function of one George Oppen. George
Oppen: A Radical Practice offers excellent selections from
the poems and a cut glass appraisal, making skilled draughts
into the works of Cezanne, Heidegger and Oppen's contemporaries
without ever losing sight and dimension to these handcrafted
poems. Rather than divulging any answers, secrets, insights and
full MFA malarkey that will choke a horse, one only wants more
poetry when done reading this book that was given as a lecture
at San Francisco State University. I also don't believe Martin
Heidegger has ever been quite so well shown for his currency
in Oppen's work. In the modern world, he says, a human being
is "the rational animal who is the subject for his objects"
- rather than being open to the "things" the beings,
of this world. The lived moment has disappeared. This also
means humankind, trees, prairies, animal matter, bird songs and
earth - also missing from the poetry of many who believe they
have taken up the cause of "language" but not the gristle,
landscape and the blood of Lorca that Oppen also knew. He could
whistle while he worked.

More visuals and done perfectly as a pint
size text overseeing 200 years of an often brutal history lesson:
Black Images in the Comicsas capsulized by the
Scandinavian Fredrik Stromberg...taking us, once
again, by the hand through a racist land. Thank our lucky stars
we've had the foreign artists of Lang, Renoir, Genet, Godard,
Herzog, Wenders, Beltrametti, Ali G and now Stromberg to show
us, partly, what they love and hate about us.

All of us have seen and been aware of The
Art of Romare Bearden(1911-88) more than we may realize
- mostso the masterfully and socially charged collages infused
with an African American music and coloring with bold strokes
of either ancient ritual or topical injustice. The stuff is all
memorable and now hardened as classic, or will be, after more
of it is seen. Culled from many private collections this volume
offers a rare sighting of a rare bird recently shown at the National
Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Clear-eyed text by Ruth
Fine with helpful contributors.

Miracle in the Scrap Heap, the sculpture
of Richard Stankiewicz by Emmie Donadio & others, working in a backwoods junkyard the last few weeks
I've been tempted to want to show what potential is to
the owners of this small town eye-sore as we load on vintage
and smashed truck fenders, dinged hubcaps and other heavy hardware...the
very ingredients to artist Stankiewicz's 1950s own world makings.
This book offers the first true showcase of this junk sculpturist's
work, along with bibliography, grand full page photographs and
a narrative chronology. It's been said the young Stankiewicz
found his art by digging up ground for a garden and finding iron
parts from an earlier time and tossing these to one side. The
rest is history. Not as refined and monumental as David Smith
but plumb workman basic and boldly a junkman's dream.

"Janey" isSacagawea's
Nickname by Larry McMurtry but I'm not giving any thing away.
The story behind Captain William Clarks' affection for the Indian
guide (actually brought along on the Lewis & Clark expedition
because she could speak Shoshone) is a better yarn along with
the varied and quite personal essays on the American west by
this Texas native, blockbusting author and roving bookseller.
Where else would one find an appreciation on Janet Lewis banked
against one on Zane Grey, and how the west was invented
instead of won? He might like Bill Clinton's autobiography but
he also knows how to distill what is good western reading byway
Aldo Leopold, John Graves, Edward Abbey; I just don't agree with
him on his put-down of Wright Morris's fiction, the short stories
remain masterpieces. But here's a line of scrumptious summation:
The narrative writing about the West that came before Lewis
and Clark seems fragmentary and slight; what came after them
seems insipid and slight, lacking both the scale and the force
of those "Journals". One would hope that he might
venture further from his Stanford alma matra (ie., Yvor Winters
and Janet Lewis) and sometime in an essay gain respect for the
outer reaches of some western poets Jeffers, Everson, Rexroth,
Snyder, Sund and many more, currently at work, along and at the
end of the Oregon Trail.

Bravo! someone has finally gone after and
hogtied something like four wondrous

decades of Peter & Elka Schumann and their
drama prankster crew of merriment from The Bread & Puppet
Theater and made a photographic and essays marvel titled Rehearsing
With Gods by the puppet participatory team of Ronald
T. Simon (photographer) and Marc Estrin (author).
Grace Paley kicks in a foreword to help things along since she
is also a long time member of whatever it is theater, music,
political statement taken to the streets (of four continents)
or high mown fields of northern Vermont. Once seen, never forgotten.
It's the sort of theater kids can scream and laugh and play and
join and make noise in, and grow up with. That's culture.

Don't fret long-time Ted Kooser
readers - the opening chapter of the four in his new book of
poems Delights & Shadowsis a bit thin
and disappointing. No longer the wry sense of humor or old barn
leaning poems of an earlier Kooser; by the second chapter "The
China Painters" everything of a wiser poet, a loving son
and relative, a nostalgia of pure storytelling comes into play
so that longer narrative and short poem one-shot resonance begins
to work its magic. You'll want to read on. I like it that a poet
can still be likened to Williams and Frost - what's wrong with
wide open branched and leafed yard trees? or that out of pure
spite and meanness/sometimes they peed in the creamed corn

Lord I'm getting sick of yet one more book
on the art and craft in the "heartland" of New England
as Made By Hand with of course a cover illustration
by Barry Moser and next to nobody in the book a true hillbilly.
A true find. A true native. At least Carol Blinn is included
- long time printer, designer, paper decorator and binder from
Warwick Press of Easthampton, Massachusetts. And there's a hardworking
potter and his crew with a ramshackle outdoor kiln splitting
wood by hand and firing it up. But where are the chainsaw bears,
sculptured stone monuments, colossal indigenous habitats, musical
backwoods freakish marvels? I've seen and heard and stepped into
and around a bunch all my life here. Does heartland in
New England now and forever mean expensive goods made for expensive
and deep pockets? Are we to believe city folk are truly going
to get their way when they move up here into Martha Stewart homes,
kitchens , SUVs and arrogance? They took Northampton but we shouldn't
let them take Brattleboro. One would hope author Jeanne
Braham and photographer MarySchjeldahl
will make another book some day that tells the country folks
tale. Used materials made into something better than new.

We're all still close to it, in fact we're
all in the middle of it - the death of the American Dream - brilliantly
told by Mitch Epstein in Family Business,
his personal story and photographs on the rise and fall
of Holyoke, Massachusetts Epstein Furniture store, a landmark
business up until the 1980s which faced a nightmare when two
teenage boys in the city, on a windy August night in 1999, broke
into an abandoned apartment building owned by the photographer's
father and just for jollies set the place ablaze. They had tried
unsuccessfully months earlier and returned the second time to
get it right. The fire swept up a 19th century Catholic church
before turning on an entire city block. The book is a collage
of four chapters: store, property, town, home and a universal
story (parallels to my own family and lumber business in the
same region are eerily haunting) of the oldest son returning
home to help put the pieces together by painstakenly revealing
and attempting to mend not only the rise and fall from grace
of an industrial New England town into the pits of drug-dealing
hell, but tracing what led up to the liquidation of a Jewish
immigrant business dynasty, by squirreling into the family, neighborhood,
customers and coworkers by camera, video and a shot to the head
text. All that everything that was.

Since when did all the experimenters move
south? It says so here, and many of the poets I have been reading
for years, and now their biographies read southern in Another
South, experimental writing in the south edited by Bill Lavender
an important addition to the never ending cycle of unread
anthologies that proliferate from university presses. Thank the
University of Alabama for sponsoring this one, otherwise the
majority of the poets involved will be a mean search party to
even find one of their individual books. I own a bunch, stapled
wraps and handmade fixtures when not folded blazingly visual
rituals that can't help but turn your eye. I just happen to much
like the majority of the poets herein, barely dabblers but hardpressed
purists in syntactical disjunctions, whether Jim Leftwich, Bob
Grumman and now even Thomas Meyer is thought of as one of the
included. The series advisory board for the press is celebrity
gilded and though the asking price for the paperback is steep,
I found mine in an ivy league New England bookshop going out
of business, with books slashed by 50% and this one about all
that was left in the poetry section as one diamond in the rough.
The introduction by Hank Lazer "Poetry Scouting Mission:
at the intersection of southern and experimental" could
be the modern day equivalent of Davy Crockett shooing us forth
through the Cumberland Gap. Shouldn't Jonathan Williams be part
of this bunch just for his sharp local ear and old timer's sake?

Play guitar? then this is your book, maybe
bible: C.F. Martin and His Guitars 1796-1873 by Philip
F. Gura elegantly designed and published from the University
of North Carolina Press where the author teaches and made possible
to access the treasure trove of archives through the Martin family
and business. One more unique success story from nineteenth-century
America via a German immigrant so that Eric Clapton can hold
one of his many Martin guitars today. Gura follows the chord
from the physical development of the guitar while detailing a
portrait of a craftsman balancing quality workmanship, industrialization
and a marketing savvy

that has continued to prosper into its sixth-generation.
The color plates are mouth watering and the author's pace for
a historical story holds its own appeal.

Lifted up with two hands, the foredge paper
to this tome is rainbow colored - either designed that way or
just the way it happened but Grateful Dead, TheIllustrated
Trip is the absolute must for any Deadhead and those that
still want to be ( didn't it happen for most in 1967 by putting
the band's first album on in a room alone and finding one's life
forever changed, sparkled? ) and for all those that want to believe
this group, of any American musicians, were a troupe, a tribe,
a happening, a cause, or as their chief lyricist Robert Hunter
and cult figure all his own states, "If there had been no
Grateful Dead it would have been necessary to invent one".
Inventing is too static, I believe this group was simply spawned
from

its Cold War to sixties majestic/rebellious
time which begins as a long rope time-line through the heart
of the book, starting in 1940 when bassist Phil Lesh was born
in Berkeley, California and was transformed by age 4 when he
first heard Brahms' First Symphony to Hunter's birth the
following year and Jerry Garcia a half year after the attack
on Pearl Harbor. The production of the book is in the care of
Grateful Dead Productions which in its heyday rivaled the generating
powers of the US Congress so by page two in the time-line they
get it just right by duly noting both Kenneth Rexroth and Muddy
Waters. Full force portraits of each band member are the only
interruption to a massive attack kandy kolored streamlined visual
mind & nostalgia trip that I guarantee will exhaust anyone
willing to ride a two-day, 12 hour each day, reading and spritzing
marathon. But that's about the best and only way to grab the
buzz. It's way too much -but possible! - and that was always
the point.

Now to the real dead. But something the Dead
and Woody Guthrie and John Fahey could play to Ghosts in
the Wilderness, abandoned America by Tony and Eva Worobiec
a married photographic team like no other, combining their travelogue

portraits (in black & white:he/color:she)
through a mainly ghost town and plains of Montana, North and
South Dakotas, Nebraska and corners of Colorado and Wyoming.
Inspired by Terrence Malik's film Badlands and being Europeans
and coming to the States wide-eyed (even The Beatles did), the
Worobiecs glean a America barely past 1965 in texture through
the caught images of barns, railroads, houses, vehicles, appliances
and a wide skyward aura that is just right. Even the people met
along the way are the devoted and take a timeless photograph.
Wright Morris was a native midwesterner who came home once upon
a time to take his own photographs that were made into an instant
classic all its own by his indigenous feel for things. No one
could quite photograph an abandoned farm like a boy who grew
up in one but the Worobiecs have paid attention and come mighty
close. Their commentary throughout tells a tale of wide open
spaces and why that is (I've many times ridden a train through
eastern Montana where I'm told "nothing is out there"),
and stalwart sections that have hung on simply because of certain
individuals and church communities. This land is your land, this
land is my land.

- Bob Arnold

And by this we are carried into the incalculable
- George Oppen

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND:
POETRY & MUSIC : SUMMER 2004

This from the poet George Evans this morning
in the mailbox states it elegantly enough:

Dear Friends:

A sad note to let you know, if you have not
already heard, that Carl

Rakosi died Thursday evening, June 24, after
100 1/2 years of energy.

Yrs, George

C a r l R a k o s i

1903 - 2004

Learn the grandiose manner

and the unending Orphic line.

Midpassage:
I'm 100 pages into Christopher Rick's book on Bob Dylan and finding
it almost heavenly monotonous. Meaning, I'm sorry for that but
I can't help myself. The text reads like the cake you should
be eating and instead you're eating the box the cake came in.
Or, as if Dame Edith Sitwell circa 1965 in our wildest imagination
was speaking about the "boys" in The Rolling Stones
and shouldn't we all be taking these lads more seriously? Nobody
has ever spoken finer about Bob Dylan than Bob Dylan himself,
and he knew that instinctively from Woody Guthrie. A true tradition
is hard to break. But if we are going to have a book on Dylan
- and already we have had excellent examples from Paul Williams
and Greil Marcus - why not let an Oxford don sweep it into the
academy once and for all? Like all lecturers he's mainly running
into his cobwebbed intelligence and we sit in the audience amused
as he swats his way free. He pinpoints his examples though often
with a deft hand - reaching from Song to Woody over into
the murkily brilliant The Basement Tapes and for the very
first time we actually have someone aligning Dylan with Tennyson
correctly and not forgetting Blind Willie McTell. It's an important
book; and I wouldn't imagine Ricks minding that while reading,
playing the songs right alongside. (Dylan's Visions of Sin, Christopher
Ricks, Ecco 2004)

In the meantime:
I share a little exchange (the complete text), call it a found-poem,
that happenstanced last week from a disgruntled reader/listener
wishing to visit our family with an unkind note addressed to
Carson about his music columns over the last few years. I would
have stood back and been ignorant mainly to the affair except
the bugger had to include me (aw, hell) and Carson's mother who
happens to be not only my better half, but the whole halves.
It's as another friend described as a Punch & Judy moment.
But this, dear reader is what it all has come down to. The disgruntled
one is a fine musician I am sure but like all those in the experimental
field - whether music, painting, poetry etc - they believe anything
they do is at least fascinating. Which is as fascistic
as the conservative party telling me they know what's good for
me, and you, and just buckle down and do it. But I still hold
to: if it ain't got that swing/it don't mean a gosh darn thing.
Practitioners from Gertrude Stein to Sun Ra practiced that. I
don't know this reader from adam but that didn't seem to want
to stop him from coming in the house swinging. Here is, supposedly,
what MTV could be replaced by - foul mannered and unholy disciplined
"experimenters".

John:

I'm going to get right to the point.

You are, in my opinion, the single worst "critic"
I've ever encountered.

Your writing is incomprehensible.

Please return to whatever "home schooled"
hole you crawled out of, listen to your Oasis CD, and don't worry......everything
that you trash because your narrow mind can't understand it,
will continue to thrive.

Oh, yeah.......you may not want to use your
father's "poetry" as a template. It, too, is pathetic.
(and your mom is probably fat)

Bob:

Hey Baby,

You hit the nail right on the head.

Not only "fat", but lazy.

Rave on John Donne!

John:

She/He is lazy.

If either one of them "taught" you
basic English usage, they would have realized, through your writing,
that their techniques were failing and would not have let you
publish anything until you actually learned something..........come
to think of it, doesn't your father publish his own crap? I guess
that would explain his beaming pride in your sub-bob self-righteous
reviews.

Bob:

Sorry charlie, you just have to do your own
homework. The "crap" that has been published is 30
books or better and most have been published by other publishers
around the world. That means mucho territory, contacts and support.
"Beaming" is what you lack. "Technique" is
for

those minus talent. And learning something
depends on what's to learn. There is nothing wrong, bad, sloppy,
or misguided in any of the reviews...you just don't like them.
Turn the page.

John:

Well Bob,

Seeing as you are answering for the kid, why
don't you pass this along to

him.......

A talentless 19 year-old has no right to pass
judgement on people who have

made music their lives.

Your son has a long history of making enemies
among people who are trying to

expand the palette of music past the limits
of what a talentless 19 year-old

too stupid to even know that the shit is being
forced down their throats by

suits) and stop pretending that he's some
wise musicologist.

Bob:

The "kid" is much too smart to answer
someone so angry. Terming someone "talentless" after
he has issued 100 issues by single hand on every subject from
John Hurt to Static X pisses your credibility down a very very
narrow hole. Think on that a moment. It's also impossible to
have a "long history" - since he's only a "kid"
- at making any serious enemies . He hasn't cast any stone, just
a shadow, with an independent streak at seeing what works and
what doesn't. If he's such a punk, what's got you shaking? I
also shouldn't have to remind you, old man, how many 19 year
olds once ruled the music and poetry worlds. And will again.
I'm defending nothing here except independence: you keep yours.
You're a total mess with character assassinations that can't
be backed up; but like I said, you keep yours. If the "kid's"
anything like I think he is, it will only have him kick in the
octane one step deeper.

Keep it rolling:
Strong reports are returning about Michael Moore's Farenheit9/11. A survey from this neck of the woods and as the
crow flies is that theaters have been sold-out from almost the
first hour of showcasing the film. It's in the dummy multiplexes
and nothing could be better. The same mind that built these monstrosities
(and the war machine) are having to show a film that they know
is making money and maybe kids under age of the R-rating are
sneaking in. Maybe it will get into the craw of those not part
of the choir (people handing out antiBush leaflets at independent
theaters), the magic is admirable but one has to now buy a ticket
for your conservative friend and take them along. This is grass-roots
activism and for a change we have a film, a performance, that
is happening right now as we live. It's not an aftermath film
as the remarkable Hearts and Minds was for the Vietnam
War, coming as Nixon and Vietnam were falling at once (1974).
Farenheit is in office at this very second (Sometimes the
President of the United States must standnaked) and
if you need to be shown a golden lyrical moment, here it is.

Lay down the book

and match your wits

against this bird

when day breaks.

- Carl Rakosi

~ Bob Arnold

June 27, 2004

A Woodburners Letter
re: Michael Moore's film Farenheit 9/11

Dear David,

I know exactly what you mean about not wanting
to join the throngs for the 'best-seller'. It comes from wanting
our dignity and independence, and mostso for many artists, a
place where they have been put. We work from an isolation and
often need to create from one. Seeing a film like this one, one
wants to feel discovery! And how to feel discovery among the
minnows squirming into the multiplex of all places, to see and
hear the truth be told. The irony is biting. But it is exactly
how we did it yesterday - though, I admit, we drove for the first
showing anywhere in the area. Matinee at 11AM, amidst the crappiest
of stores in the mall, the putrid fast food drecked in the lobby
or whatever they call such places. Where old men congregate at
a squished up table and shoot the shit. Where two fools in a
middle aisle actually spend the day hawking the merits of the
latest cell-phone. You must have one! Where Carson sees for the
first time that you can actually go to the dentist now in a mall...and
when you walk out from a drilling, run smack into an island of
gumballs and candy machines. We are ruined. Just don't tell anybody.

But what is good is that throngs are milling
to the multiplexes and seeing this film. And even better we all
are part of it, and even better yet that you feel a union, an
anti-polarization, a gathering amongst like minds, or simply
minds and what are these tears in your eyes when the film has
only just begun? We've all been hurt horribly, trounced on, ignored
and pistol whipped by mongrels that have pissed on everything
green and growing and fruit bearing for way too long. We've lost
fathers and best friends and old pets and landscapes to these
bastards and the world can't quite get a grip around that fact.
We've been abused and watched others be cruelly shamed and murdered
all for the gain of a precious crap induced few. When you reach
the lone black woman early in the film speak, and I mean with
sincerity rarely seen and experienced today, and she speaks of
loss (at the true 9-11) it will be yours with mine and
the woman sitting two seats to the left of Susan. I know they
both have tears in their eyes as well, I don't have to ask. Asking
is not knowing. And at the same time a sickening will depress
the body, the soul, the heart, the vision as the story known
already so well unfolds.

It's a masterpiece and over zealous well educated
sorts like (Christopher) Hitchens are worthless at this point.
I've already read my Orwell. This film requires a messenger more
organic and wise. It slams at things, it's muckraking of a Steffens
sort but with that twist of Twain, it has its ducks all neatly
in a row. Call it opinion but the facts are there. I say let
the opponents show their "facts" but we know all they
have, and always have had, is a self gratuitous evilness now
spun in whole cloth through our neighborhoods, workplaces, and
families. They've bleached the landscape. What 'voice' that once
was there, back in the days of foot movement and a postage stamp,
has been blown to pieces by a mecurial Reich. It's been years
since I've applauded a film at its end with a crowd that also
couldn't help itself. That reflex is a spark, the one we need
right about now.

You bet I'm damn proud it was Cheney who told
Vermont (Leahy) to "Fuck" off. Let it now be known,
Lee Iacocca of all people, has now stated we need "a new
CEO and a new president".

Drive on driver.

~ Bob Arnold

June 26, 2004

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND
- NEARLY SUMMER 2004

I N M E M
O R Y O F

D a v e D e l l i n g e r

N O M E M O
R Y O F

R o n a l d R e a g a n

Everyone should attend a Patti Smith concert
- afterwards, I haven't slept as well for months.

You all should have been with us June 3rd
- we celebrated Allen Ginsberg's birthday with Patti Smith, and
400 others ! as she put on a packed two and one half hour show,
with no-stops, and kicked off her "Trampin" tour for
the next two months. She had a full screen backdrop while reading
one of AGs 'holy'poems for his birthday and there
was AG on the screen holding court. I saw Dylan do this for AG
right after his death at another concert. His friends always
know how to throw in for him. And Smith has this uncanny
ability - like Ginsberg in the late 60s appearing on Mike
Douglas's afternoon talk-shows and talking calm as a daisy about
CIA infiltrated drug wars in Southeast Asia - to show up on the
dullest of talk shows and speak like a loving daughter about
her loving mother and sing a song to match. And this concert
was a powerhouse. Smith has a terrific band still with veterans
Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty and she is one of the very few
left who can both attach to a free-feel and sound, and still
make a whalloping political statement... whether to the American
Indian, human rights, Iraq, war mongers or Gandhi. And there
isn't a wasted second in any of the show. Even at the tail end
when almost all the band have finally walked off, drummer Daugherty
drags his jacket against left off instruments to generate
a thrum of feedback as he likewise tosses what is left of his
sticks to the front of the crowd. My son could have grabbed at
any of these but instead he enjoyed watching the young girls
that did. Patti Smith had left behind her magic in one young
man.

The concert got off on a late start. Doors
didn't open like they were posted, so while we all waited
in spring showers one could see it was a Patti crowd - music
lovers of all stripes and only one loud mouth telling us
how his body's been tattooed floor to ceiling. The band also
came on late, but they never let up. Their encore - "Gloria"
mostso - killed the place well over two hours later. Two young
guys to the right of Smith, and Kaye steady as he rode to her
left and almost all members switch guitars, so when Kaye isn't
leading he's on bass, the bass player then is on keyboard, the
drummer was a spike driven down the center. All regular guys.
Smith in her torn coat and slumped ease has that way of harmonizing
a woman's approach to rock and roll that I don't think I have
ever quite seen like this before. There is a nurturing, a motherhood,
a punk, and a dead set down the groove rocker. It is a show not
to miss. She played at Pearl Street in Northampton for us, Boston
the next night, your town tomorrow night and the two month tour
plans to stretch to Edinburgh; so friends in U.K. take notice.
Take young people to these concerts - they're weren't nearly
enough high school aged attending and Patti Smith should be required
listening at that age. It's all about hope.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AS IF I AM JUST TALKING TO YOU ABOUT SOME
RECENT BOOKS I READ AND LOVED SO LET'S PRETEND I AM:

From the Meadow, Peter Everwine (U/Pitts,
2004): Peter Everwine has always been
a rare breed, quietly skilled like a Jean Valentine and a few
of Bert Myers poems. So quiet that I thought he was long gone
and then shows up this new and selected collection of poems from
nearly five decades, including chosen gems of his translations
from the Hebrew and Nahuatl and it all runs in under 100 pages.
Remarkable restraint in these times. Where do I pin the medal?
This evening, coming back to my room

To be saved I must dear Frank Samperi, Spiritual Necessity (Station
Hill, 2003) as edited by a brotherly spirit John Martone
may as well shiver as if human in your hands since one poet gifted
is choosing another and selecting from its own world of 20 books
where one very short poem is its own world could pass as a book.
As yours. Discovered by Zukofsky and Corman, Samperi ever remains
to be discovered.

Guillaume Apollinaire, The Self-Dismembered
Man (Wesleyan 2004) just when
you thought you had read this old WWI casualty and French marvel
under your belt, comes this clean as a whistle edition of later
poems as translated by poet Donald Revell. Fresh stuff, spacey,
blasting language, before the television was invented. The
ballroom spins in eternity

Hans Faverey, Against the Forgetting
(New Directions 2004) first the
slap-face clarity of Gennady Aygi, now Faverey. "Hand it
to New Directions", goes my refrain - James Laughlin may
have been a wealthy man but he was also a clever foreman
to leave his ranch with such skilled editors who continue to
pop off one new book after another with dexterity and range.
These days: parlor made poems of Muriel Spark to the body being
drained white by a clutch of Faverey poems, it's your choice.
What is of fire falls to no other share

Now to the clincher of little howls Aleksandar
Ristovic, Devil's Lunch (Faber 1999) It's still a wonder
moment to find a book of this sort, translated from the Serbian
by Charles Simic and naturally fully possessed. I believe Simic
would give his eye teeth to write his own poems this well, and
as brisk and haunting. Second best is still just as good when
the collection is as harrowing and seductive and dream pictured.
I see small coaches passing between the trees. If this isn't
your cup of tea you even need it more than you think you don't.
O where haven't I and when didn't I do it!

Time to really cook. Open up, any page - and
it's a big book - Dick Waterman's Between Midnight and Day
(Thunder's Mouth Press 2003) and expect to be pulled
in, even if you don't sing the Blues. Waterman is the long heralded
founder of Avalon Productions, the first agency to exclusively
promote and manage blues musicians in the USA. The early 1960s,
a time when it took another white man, Red Auerbach, to represent
a black genius basketball player and mind, Bill Russell...Waterman
in 1964 rediscovered Son House and never seemed to stop.
Companion, surrogate, manager to many blues musicians Waterman
also photographed as he lived and each photograph here, designed
large, comes big bad and beautiful into our presence. Hardly
ever is the commentary to blues photographs nearly as good as
the sights - in this case, the text by Waterman is by a guy who
has learned the hard away - amongst the best - to talk straight.
Luther Allison on page 103 could be Hendrix. Tough to put down.

Long Shot, Beat Bush Issue! guest
edited by Eliot Katz (P.O. Box 6238, Hoboken, NJ. 07030) Bush: meaning the punk in the White House., and edited
by one of the better poets and now editor for this issue who
has absolutely no axe to grind,

except to throw out the trash. Poets
range from legends to complete nobodies, my kinda people. It's
like one long march with nearly 100 poets and artists built to
work. No crybabies. Singing at the top of their lungs.

Louise Landis Levi, Avenue A & 9th
Street (Shivastan Publishing shivastan@hotmail.com) one who should have been in the Beat Bush Issue!
with her compatriots but you can't be everywhere at once. Well
noted translator of Michaux, Daumal, and Sanskrit classics ,
Louise Landis Levi like fellow travelers Franco Beltrametti,
Ira Cohen and the unnamed, writes unique landscape compositions
. Her line breaks are hardly breaks, purely continuance, and
as poetry should be. From an interesting publisher issuing limited
editions with a stable of poets as Janine Pommy Vega, Ed Sanders,
Andy Clausen, Rene Ricard. I drank the nectar, as says
Louise.

Ross Feld, Guston In Time (Counterpoint
2003) of all the books out remembering
the artist Philip Guston - and so many poets did theirs, and
maybe more to come - this one seems the finest. Stretching over
two decades and loaded with such sincere heart in both commentary
and letters between two friends and creators. Or it could be
that Ross Feld was so well known by writers for his four novels
and one pocket size book of poems Plum Poems, a title
straight off the WCW tree but all his own, and still so little
read, and worse - dead too young - that this posthumous
book comes, somehow, with even a greater calling, alertness and
masterful storytelling.

Theodore Enslin, Nine (National Poetry
Foundation 2004) let me go out on
a limb here of the 'American Tree' and say the Lang Gang might
learn a thing or two if they read more Enslin - and not just
any Enslin, but be my guest - he has about 100 books - but mostso
this latest Enslin of nine books published between 1993 to 2003
by some of the smallest presses imaginable and made into one
crystallized volume. From a musician, which Enslin is, they would
learn yes "composition of theme-and-variation sequences,
exploring the musical permutations of a limited cluster of words"
but it is also a model that a life comes from somewhere,
and to be attentive to it and what it may also surround.
NINE surrounds with magnificence. By chance in a bookshop and
paging, take a breather and enter Enslin's "Scripturals."
Before the moment is another moment

Thomas A. Clark's world is another I love, and poets this good,
make worlds. In Clark's world it is language and landscape
entwined, meant to be both read and heard - and at best - hiking
with poems in hand on a trail to the sea floating sweet grass
/ sweet floating grass and coming to terms fully with the
mind and body makes, baby, harmony. For decades now Clark
has published countless books, pamphlets, cards, sweeties, wee
things, print happy handed masterpieces from his Moschatel Press
now from Scotland. The packet arrives in my woods of Vermont
like the best pen pal I've had since Beatlemania, all gorgeously
hand-made folded ingenuity booklets that are saved like a dessert,
or else read right on the spot as rhythm of breath. Everything
is essential. floating sweet grass (2004) floats as language
and printed structure. Gorse River Sequence (2004)
is a sequence of 4 line poems attached, or not, but it will make
up its own mind with you lingering under alders and each
poem etched with an utmost care. Sealevel (October Foundation
2003) is twenty-four fiddle tunes but the reader provides
the tune-in-mind after the notion of a tune is set in place with
the briefest of words the four mile stone / give me your hand
/ scatter the mud, etc. It's a very clever mind and so evenly
sure of its materials.

This just in:
from Gary Lawless, a poetry site we advocate and share, pass
the word -

"I have begun a poetry blog for poets
and poetry from countries embargoed by the united states."

to reach the blog go to:

http://embargopoets.blogspot.com

Cid Corman, The Famous Blue Aerogrammes
(Longhouse 2004) choosing Cid's poems
sent as mail-art of a sort on each of his aerogrammes from Kyoto
since 1990. Part: he couldn't help himself: everything was poetry
/ and always wishing to elicit a "response". I once
watched him patiently speak with a parrot in a zoo who wasn't
talkative that day. We sat around until the poor bird finally
croaked a word. That determination to exist, was all Cid.
Forget that I edited the poems down from many hundreds to about
100. It was easy as pie. And some of his best. Life
is poetry

Rodrigo Rey Rosa, The Good Cripple (New
Directions 2004) translated by Esther
Allen and one more cut to the bone tale from the master of the
restraint and part fictitous-real world storytelling. In this
novel of layered focusing a young man is kidnapped in Guatemala
City, his wealthy father is yet to respond, a toe is cut off
and sent....in time Paul Bowles emerges in the text as if this
literary form just can't help itself and never once does the
author lose his step, or authority. A revenge thriller steeped
in allegory, where each knife thrown at the door sticks.

Yet one more from New Directions due in your
local bookstores in September will be Nicanor Parra's Anti-Poems:
How To Look Better & Feel Great (New Directions 2004)
decades ago when this publisher first published the Chilean poets
"Antipoems" it was a great gimmick in a time of fuller
rebellion - before the Internet, before Reagan, even before Pinochet
- when a gag could run the streets. Translator Liz Werner takes
this all in spirit and presents her "antitranslations"
of these antipoems since Parra insists that nothing can be translated
and only "re-written", and that the best thing would
be for the reader to learn Spanish. This bilingual edition provides
you the way. As a teacher of mathematics and professor
of physics Parra's edge is understanding both the line and the
letter, or as he states

In antipoetry, it is poetry thtat is sought,
not eloquence. Roll up your sleeves.